Once again our wanderings around the Internet have taken us to yet another site with yet another new form of Ephemera. New to me at least… I am sure many of my readers have been aware of, and perhaps collecting, Book Trade Labels for years.
Thanks to a website authored by a Mr. Greg Kindall of Kirkland, Washington, I have learned a great deal about what he defines as:
“small and sometimes beautiful labels pasted more or less discreetly into the endpapers. Publishers, printers, binders, importers, distributors and sellers of books — new, second-hand and antiquarian — used to advertise in this way their contribution to bringing the book to market.”
Greg’s website.. Seven Roads, a name that he tells us was “inspired by the components of the classically-derived education known in the Middle Ages as the Trivium and the Quadrivium, or the Seven Liberal Arts“consists of several variations: a weblog, a complete serial list of Everyman’s Library titles, a translation into Latin of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Childs Garden of Verses” (Wow!), an essay by Professor James Hadley LL. D. on the mystic preëminence of the number Seven and yes, finally, a Gallery of Book Trade Labels.
Admittedly most of Greg’s collection is virtual - but non the less, impressive. Greg tells us from his site that there are well over 2100 labels displayed.. and that is as of June 2007. Surely he has added many more since then.
Perhaps the labels that caught our interest the most were these two from the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. The first is from Kelly & Walsh publishers and booksellers in Shanghai, China. We have frequented their Hong Kong shop many times but never really knew of their long Asian heritage going back to the 1930s when Shanghai was a center of commerce between east and west. 
And this “bookish” label from the Little Book Shop in Milwaukee. The collection has several of what are referred to as “bibliomorphic” or “libriform” labels i.e. book-shaped labels. All very interesting and fun.
So if Book Trade Labels are new to you.. or something you might find interesting, head on over to Greg’s Seven Roads Gallery and from there you may also want to pay a visit to the Museum of Booksellers Labels at Plurabelle Books in Cambridge, UK.
I’m Tom Murphy and thanks for helping me give Ephemera the encore it deserves.
Tom
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