Bookplates (This Book Belongs To)

Ex libris, printed by the sheet

A bookplate is the small label pasted inside a front cover saying who a book belongs to. This makes a page of them: keep the classic This Book Belongs To heading or type your own, pick a frame, and set how many fit.

Two across and three down by default, so six to a page. It goes as far as four across and six down, which is twenty-four small ones, or down to a single large plate for a gift.

Blank or named, and they do different jobs

Leave the name field empty and every plate prints with a write-in line. Children fill in their own name and decorate the border, and a bookplate a child has drawn on is a bookplate that stays stuck in.

Or paste a class list, one name per line, and the tool distributes the names across as many pages as it takes. Thirty pupils, five sheets, every plate personalised, and no handwriting to decipher when a book turns up in the wrong tray.

That second mode is the one that solves the actual problem, which is books that never come back.

Five frames

• Classic. A bordered plate with small corner ticks. The traditional ex libris look, and the default.
• Double. A heavier outer border with a fine inner one inside it. The smartest of the five.
• Dashed. A dashed outline all the way round, which is playful and also reads as cut-here even on a sheet where you have turned the corner marks off.
• Rounded. A plain border with a faint rule near the top, giving the plate a header band.
• Minimal. No border, just a rule top and bottom.

The date line is off by default and worth turning on for a gift or a prize, where the year is the part somebody will care about in twenty years. Cut marks are on.

Where they get stuck

School library books, so they find their way back. A gifted book, where a bookplate turns a paperback into something that was given rather than bought. A child's own shelf, which is the version they will want to decorate.

Running a set as a handwriting or art slot works well: the plates are small enough that a whole class finishes inside a lesson, and the result is thirty labelled books rather than thirty pieces of paper going home.

Printing and sticking

Plain paper and a glue stick is what most people do, and it is fine. Full-sheet sticker paper is neater and turns the whole job into cut and peel, which matters at thirty plates and not at six.

Print at full scale so the cut marks line up with the plates. And trim before you write on them, not after, because a plate that has been cut slightly crooked is much easier to live with than a name written slightly crooked.