Yudin Collection bookplate

While reviewing a truck of materials, I found three items with the following bookplate:

Since I had run across this bookplate before and admired it, I thought it would be a great visual to share in a blog post. This bookplate was specifically designed for the Yudin Collection. The Library of Congress acquired the Yudin Collection from the Siberian collector and bibliophile Gennadii Yudin (1840-1912) in 1906. It is the foundation of the Library’s Russian collections. When the volumes arrived at the Library in 1907, they were housed with the Slavic collection for a time, and then the volumes were sent to the relevant custodial divisions. Splitting the collection was a lucky break for the Law Library, which benefits from holding a number of Russian law volumes in our rare and special collections. The photo you see here is from one of our Yudin volumes.

According to Harry Leich, the Russian area specialist who has published articles about the collection, the plate was probably designed by Yudin himself. It’s also possible Yudin told Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam and/or Alexis Babine, the Russian literature specialist who brought the material back from Russia, what design he wanted on the bookplate. On the left of the plate is a portrait of Yudin; in the center a drawing of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, and on the right a drawing of Yudin’s library building in Tarakanovo. There are two versions of the bookplate, the second one printed by the former U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) in 1928 after the Library ran out of the bookplates it had printed for the arrival of the collection in 1907. When GPO printed a run in 1928, it printed the agency’s name across the bottom to credit their printing job– but not the design.

The law materials from the Yudin Collection are just some of the materials you can find here in our Law Library collections on the shelf.