The mystery of the Lady and the missing plates

In April 1844, a prospectus in the Exeter Flying Post announced the forthcoming publication of a collection of 14 tinted lithographs based on drawings by Lady Elizabeth Courtenay (1801-1867), ‘published for the benefit of a new school-house at Salcombe’. The artist behind the works, originally Elizabeth Fortescue, daughter of Earl Fortescue, had married the future Earl of Devon, William Courtenay (1807-1888) in 1830. Her husband would succeed to the peerage in 1859, at the same time taking his place as head of the household at Powderham Castle – the ancient seat of the Courtenay family.

It would be hard to look at these illustrations and not to imagine that Lady Elizabeth already felt deeply attached to the Castle and its surroundings long before this date. Powderham, as well as nearby locations such as Nutwell Court, Lympstone and Mamhead Parsonage, are pictured in idyllic rural settings, emphasising the beauty of their natural environments. The occasional use of figures in the images also suggests a peacefulness to life in this area: a woman and a child gaze out from the terrace at Powderham Castle towards the Exe estuary; a family rest against a fallen tree; a woman slowly makes her way along the path from a boat house.

Sadly though, we don’t get a sense of the full collection, as 5 of the 14 prints are missing!

There are a few reasons why these illustrations may have been removed. It may simply have been that a previous owner wished to display the attractive tinted lithographs on their wall, or to add to a collection. In his 1880 work The enemies of books, William Blades listed collectors as one of those enemies, drawing especial attention to a Mr Caspin, who he called a “destroyer” of books, his ‘rare collection . . . frequently augmented by the purchase of illustrated books, the plates of which were torn out, and mounted onto Bristol boards to enrich his collection’.

Or there may have been a more commercial motive. The book was perhaps the victim of a practice known today as ‘book breaking’ or ‘plate breaking’, meaning that the illustrations had been purposely removed so that they could be sold separately: the sum of the individual items judged to be worth more than the book as a whole. In our own Prints and Drawings collection at the DEI, we have many examples of plates that once belonged in books.

Another possibility is that the plates were removed not by somebody who owned the whole book, but by a visitor to the DEI library. In 1891, The Graphic ran a story about a man who was ‘recently brought up at Liverpool charged with the theft of a number of plates and a quantity of letterpress books in the public library there’, the author of the article reporting that they had been ‘assured by an eminent librarian that the practice of book-stealing and book-mutilation is a much more extensive one that outsiders are aware of’.

Methods of removal varied. Whilst William Blades wrote of plates being torn out, twentieth and twenty-first reports of stealing illustrations usually involve the use of razor blades. In 1884, a New York book dealer even reported that a “well-dressed and gentlemanly person” stole several plates by placing a wet tape within the volumes he was examining, thereby dampening the paper and allowing easy removal. There aren’t any visual clues as to the removal method used in Views in the South of Devon, however, as it has been rebound at some point in its history.

Just as today we have a number of measures in place to prevent damage and loss to our special collections, we can see strong evidence that our nineteenth century predecessors in the DEI were concerned to protect illustrations from would-be thieves. Many are stamped on the back to act as a deterrent, and to help trace images back to the library.

In this particular case, however, a little bit of archival sleuthing tells us that these missing plates would not have been stamped, as the book was incomplete when it arrived at the DEI.

A bookplate in the front paste down tells us that this book was ‘given by Thomas Kerslake’, although it doesn’t tell us when. A search through the DEI’s institutional archive reveals that Mr Kerslake presented a great number of works to the Institution in 1888; Lady Courtenay’s book is amongst a long list recorded in a meeting of the General Committee on 8 October of that year. Thomas Kerslake was an Exeter-born bookseller, although he spent the majority of his career in Bristol, before moving to Clevedon during his retirement. A note at the front of the book, written in pencil, reads ‘9 plates only, Sep, 27, 1888’. This was perhaps added by Kerslake when he donated the book, or, more likely, by Edward Parfitt, the Librarian at the time. Either way, this tells us that the missing plates never made it onto the DEI shelves.

Now it is always a shame when a book is incomplete, but it is particularly sad in this case. A book like this has a special connection to our own history; 7 Cathedral Close was the town house of the Courtenay family before we moved in in the early 1800s. It is also a shame because of the rarity of the book; we are the only library on Library Hub Discover to hold a copy (although the West Country Studies Library catalogue lists a complete volume). We may never know what happened to the missing plates. Perhaps they are at this moment adorning the living room of an unknowing person who is reading this blog?

Sonia Llewellyn, Librarian

Dr Sarah Spencer identified this books as a ‘star item’ by in our recent Collections Review, which took place as part of ‘The Next Chapter’ project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Sources available to view in the DEI Library: 

Lady Elizabeth Courtenay, ‘Views in the south of Devon’, (c.1845). Classmark: L.12.22 (Oversize)

Richard Palmer (engraver), ‘A mapp of Devonshire with its Hundreds’, (c.1715). Classmark: P & D 4497

Exeter Flying Post, 4 April 1844

 

Other sources

‘An ingenious book thief’, The Evening Gazette (Aberdeen), Saturday 26 July 1884

Melissa Adler, Cruising the library: perversities in the organization of knowledge, (2017)

William Blades, The enemies of books, (1880)

John Feather, Technology and the book in the nineteenth century, (1990)

‘Library thieves’, The Graphic, Saturday 23 May 1891

J. A. Marchand, ‘Kerslake, Thomas’, (2004), <https://www-oxforddnb-com.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-15478?rskey=iYGhJX&result=1> [accessed 12 August 2025]

Rebecca Rushforth, ‘The Barrow knight, the Bristol bibliographer, and a lost Old English prayer’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Vol. 13, No.1, (2004), pp. 112-131

Everett C. Wilkie, Jr (ed.), Guide to security considerations and practices for rare book, manuscript, and special collection libraries, (2011)