Mid century bookends full#

One large pair I have (again with small differences between the heads) once supported a railing of some kind. Sometimes wood carvings that were once part of something else but are too interesting to discard end up as bookends, especially if they are lions. Still, they probably got them for holiday gifts.)

Mid century bookends full#

(However, I think of their bookcases as being so full that no bookends were probably needed. Oak was a commonly used wood, matching the kind of bookcases that lawyers and academics typically had in past years. To solve this problem, some vintage carved bookends have lead inserted in the bases. The weakness of wood (as well as modern plastics such as Lucite and Bakelite) is that they aren’t very heavy, so one’s books tend to fall over. Bookends also come in solid bronze, ceramics and wood. Since the early 20th century, bookends in cast metal have proliferated and are now preferred among collectors because of the fine detail that good casting can reveal. About the same time, three methods of metalwork developed: sand casting, solid-metal casting, and electroplating. Until books became cheap and plentiful in the mid-19th century, there wasn’t must need for bookends. Then there are trees, flowers and fruits, such as grapes with enamel to add color. In addition, bookends reflect innumerable ships, Egyptian and Native American motifs and all imaginable musical instruments. The range of bookends encompasses every possible male sporting activity in several variations. Knockoffs of Rodin’s “The Thinker” and Lincoln/Washington as pair of a busts are especially evident. A quick look at eBay shows vintage bookends featuring dogs, eagles, elephants, horses, antelopes, airplanes and naked ladies, among other things, many in art deco style. Whatever you collect or however you decorate, you can probably find bookends that suit (and even match).

Oddly, Chinese female lions are shown with manes (or at least a lot of hair.) This male/female pattern shows up more often in stone (or polystone) lions on front porches and gates than in bookends, but whether metal, wood or ceramic, pairs of lions tend to be not wholly alike. In Ancient China, lions always came in pairs, as they do today almost everywhere, and one was male with a ball under his right front paw (symbolizing the world or maybe a head), while the female had a cub under her left front paw. When I looked at some wooden lion bookends of mine carefully, I first thought they might be flawed, probably because of the wood they were carved from, but I soon learned that the tradition of distinguishing lions is much older and probably influenced by the Chinese. Such mascots adhere to the rule that even giant stone lions shouldn’t be identical. Each is endowed with a distinct personality. Nicknamed Fortitude and Prudence, a much-beloved pair of giant stone lions stand guard at the entrance to the New York City Library. Interestingly, the designs of lion pairs don’t exactly match the angle of one head and the lay of its mane might differ just a little from the other. Perhaps the conceit is that our books are so precious that they deserve to be guarded by the king of beasts! Certainly, they have long been symbols of strength and power (or pride). The idea, apparently, is that lions make good guards.

Our ancestors weren’t humorless.Īnother persistent pattern for bookends is the lion. It’s a Victorian wittiness to use brass books to hold up real books.

When you have a pile of books from the library or Amazon, how do you store them? Standing up? Do you use another stack of books to prop the main group up? That’s so common a practice that many old-fashioned bookends actually were made to look like books.