july04b.indd


C o l l e g e  &  R e s e a r c h  L i b r a r i e s  

Northwestern’s
new
Maeda
bookplate



Capturing
continuity
and
change
in
an
image
for
the
21st
century


by Jeffrey Garrett 

They come in various shapes and sizes, attest to a collector’s humility or his ego, have lofty 
artistic aims—or none. But all bookplates share 
a common purpose: they establish ownership or 
they celebrate the gift of ownership. In appear-
ance they range from the humble book-label, 
a simple pasted marker that may consist of no 
more than an individual’s name, to the often 
extravagant ex libris, a miniature work of art 
that evokes a love of books, of knowledge—or 
of oneself—through an evocative image often 
combined with a densely meaningful motto. 
Great artists have labored over the centuries 
to create fine bookplates, from Lukas Cranach 
and Albrecht Dürer in the early days of print to 
Aubrey Beardsley and M. C. Escher in the 19th 
and 20th centuries. 

Donor or dedicatory bookplates memorial-
ize an event, a departed friend or loved one, 
or they state a noble purpose for which a gift is 
made to a library. They, too, can be works of 
fine typographic or calligraphic art or contain 
an image that evokes a place, a relationship to 
books, or a philosophy of learning. 

Creating a new bookplate 
Devising a donor bookplate for the 21st 
century was the charge given to a team of 
Northwestern librarians. The goal was to 

create a new design that would celebrate 
both the generosity and vision of major 
donors and the place of the library in an 
academic environment—an environment 
in which the library is less and less a place 
and where more and more of what libraries 
house are media and screen resources, rather 
than traditional books. In this endeavor, the 
bookplate team was advised by the head of 
library development, Harrie Hughes, and by 
two gifted graphic artists from Northwestern’s 
Department of University Relations, Vickie 
Lata and Ken Pagni. 

We began by looking at bookplates through 
history, from the ancient labels that brought 
down curses (anathema) upon thieves and the 
devotional (ex voto) bookplates of medieval and 
early modern times to the armorial bookplates 
of aristocratic collectors and the ex libris created 
by famous artists for wealthy bourgeois. We 
then turned to a review specifically of book-
plates at Northwestern, itself a rich and varied 
tradition, still seamlessly documented on our 
library shelves. 

Throughout 2002, guided by our artistic 
advisers, we met for brainstorming and plan-
ning sessions. We knew we wanted an artistic 
statement that would capture the essence of the 
scholarly process, its mixture of continuity and 

About the author 

Jeffrey Garrett is assistant university librarian for collection management at Northwestern University Library, e-mail: 
jgarrett@northwestern.edu 

© 2004 Jeffrey Garrett 

376 / C&RL News July/August 2004 

mailto:jgarrett@northwestern.edu


change, and do so without anachronism. We 
wanted to apply a visual language appropriate 
to our era—yet also be aesthetically stimulating, 
exciting, even provocative: a design that would 
itself teach as well as delight. 

And we sought an artist who was up to 
the task. 

Enter the artist 
We found that artist in John Maeda, a 37-
year-old Seattle native, professor of design 
and computation at MIT’s renowned Media 
Lab, and recipient of numerous national 
and international awards, among them 
most recently the Muriel Cooper Prize of 
the Design Management Institute (2001), a 
National Design Award (2001), and Japan’s 
Mainichi Design Prize (2002). In 1999, 
Maeda was included in Esquire magazine’s 
list of the 21 most important people of the 
21st century. He is, in the words of The New 
York Times, “a prize-
winning graphic designer 
and kinetic artist with 
a fistful of engineering 
degrees.”1 Maeda sees his 
own mission as fostering 
the growth of what he calls 
“human technologists”— 
people who are capable of 
articulating future culture 
through an informed 
understanding of the 
technologies they use.2 

Maeda was the perfect 
artist for our project. 

Yet how to win such an 
artist for a library bookplate 
project, someone who once 
created squares that change 
shape when a viewer shouts 
at them3 and one of the 
famously outré bottles for 
Absolut Vodka?4 Perhaps 
we underestimated Maeda’s 
interest in seemingly “utilitarian” art forms or the 
persuasive powers of our own artist-communi-
cator, Vickie Lata, but it turned out that  Maeda 
was delighted to accept our commission and 
immediately set out to work. 

After several months of intense back-and-
forth between the Northwestern design team 
and the artist, “channeled” by Vicki Lata, we 
found ourselves at last on the same page. 

Among several design ideas that Maeda 
presented—each of them fascinating in their 
own way—we chose one that generated a 
typographic cascade based on user input. 
The interactivity that Maeda built into his 
design allowed the Northwestern team, in the 
finest tradition of bookplate creation and in 
reaction to ideas we saw in Maeda’s art, to 
devise an appropriate motto: “Northwestern 
University Library: Imagination–Transforma-
tion–Synthesis.” Maeda put this text through 
the gradual randomization program he had 
developed, and the product is what you 
see below. 

Maeda’s bookplate works on many levels, 
not the least as a simple work of art. Depend-
ing upon the color in which it is rendered (and 
we chose three: green, blue, and Northwestern 
purple), a viewer’s first impression might be 
of water trickling down a stony mountain 
face, of ivy or moss hanging from a wet wall 

or cliff, or—no need to 
deny it—of the dream or 
the nightmare of an over-
worked typesetter. 

But the Maeda book-
plate also draws each 
viewer in, even in the 
miniature form in which it 
has been realized. What is 
it saying? In what follows, 
I want to offer one view-
er’s interpretation—with 
the caveat, that like all 
fine works of art, Maeda’s 
Northwestern bookplate 
admits of many differ-
ent readings and many 
different points of view, 
none of them exclusively 
valid. 

What it’s saying 
The design appears to 
cascade downward, clari-

fying as it does from an unintelligible 
jumble of letters and typographic forms 
into what at the end is a clearly articulated, 
clearly legible statement, almost as if this 
statement had gradually formed from an 
inchoate and preverbal idea. This seems 
in tune with the view of modern cognitive 
science, which tells us that at least 95 percent 
of all thought is unconscious, but that this 95 

Northwestern University’s new 
donor bookplate designed by artist 
John Maeda. 

C&RL News July/August 2004 / 377 



percent “shapes and structures all conscious 
thought.”5 

Where does the unconscious receive its 
inspiration? Surely one of the most impor-
tant sites of inspiration is the dialogue with 
resources of the library, regardless if encoun-
tered in the physical form of books, journals, 
or visual media, or the virtual form of online. 
As one student put it recently in a poetic 
tribute, “my primary experience of libraries . . . 
begins in the predawn of thought, in the realm 
of the senses. . . . [E]ach book I pass announces 
a potential personal discovery, an unexpected 
inroad to an unexplored self.”6 

Knowledge, then, begins in the vague, 
amorphous world of sensual, preverbal ex-
perience, the domain we call imagination, 
where we experience an excitement—the 
excitement of learning and 
of original creation—that 
we are not yet able to ar-
ticulate. This excitement, 
the “predawn of thought,” 
is the state that Maeda 
renders at the top of this 
bookplate. 

The struggle that then 
begins is to transform the 
basic inspirations which 
we feel to be good into 
c o n s c i o u s  k n o w l e d g e ,  
knowledge which can also 
be conveyed intelligibly 
to others. This process of 
transformation takes years 
to learn and then also years 
to practice—indeed our 
entire lives. Learning it is without doubt at 
the heart of the educational enterprise. We 
find it embodied in the gradual formation of 
clear text as we proceed down the page of 
Maeda’s design. 

The final step in this process of inspiration 
and learning is the succinct, concise expression 
of an idea or a string of ideas using the formal 
tools of language. This ultimate step—we have 
called it synthesis—can be in the form of a pub-
lished article, an undergraduate honors thesis, 
a poem, or even a single carefully crafted and 
articulated sentence. It is also where we arrive at 
the end of Maeda’s artistic journey, when at last 
legible text is displayed: clear, regular, and bold. 
It is a journey that often begins in the library 
and ends in the creation of new knowledge, 

which in turn finds its way to the shelves (be 
they real or virtual) of the library. And with that 
the whole process begins anew. 

The flow of Maeda’s design captures in a 
concise and compelling image the process of 
education and of our vision for the library in the 
new millennium. It is also a statement worthy of 
Maeda’s personal mission as an educator. “To 
me,” he writes, “education is the highest form 
of intellectual philanthropy.”7 

We hope that the Northwestern communi-
ty—uniting library users, library staff, and library 
donors—will join in welcoming our new donor 
bookplate by artist John Maeda.8 

Notes 
1. Claudia Dreifus, “A Conversation with 

John Maeda: When MIT Artist Shouts, His 
‘Painting’ Listens,” New York 
Times (July 27, 1999), “F” 
Section, p. 3. 

2. From the citation for the 
2001 Muriel Cooper Prize of the 
Design Management Institute, 
cf.www.dmi.org/dmi/html 
/aboutdmi/muriel/maeda_ 
s.htm. 

3. “The Reactive Square,” 
1994: www.maedastudio. 
com/rbooks2k/rsquare.html 
(Macs only). 

4 .  “ A b s o l u t  M a e -
da,” 1999. Available on-
l i n e  a t  a b s o l u t a d . c o m  
/absolut_lists/ads/pictures 
/?id=1221&_s=ads. 

5. George Lakoff and 
Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New 
York: Basic Books, 1999). 

6. Jamie Frederic Metzl, “Searching for the 
Catalog of Catalogs.” Daedalus. Journal of the 
American Academy of Arts and Sciences 125 
(Fall 1996): 147–60. 

7. Quoted on John Maeda’s homepage at 
plw.media.mit.edu/people/maeda/. Accessed 
June 15, 2004. 

8. Thanks go out to the members of the 
bookplate design committee: Russ Clement, 
Rochelle Elstein, Harrie Hughes, and Russell 
Maylone, and to our mentors in Northwest-
ern’s Department of University Relations, 
Vickie Lata and Ken Pagni. And, of course, 
thanks to John Maeda himself, for his contri-
bution to the library of the 21st century. 

Bookplate artist John Maeda. 

378 / C&RL News July/August 2004 

http:absolutad.com
www.maedastudio