Worse fates than a library fine awaited you

The art of the bookplate rose from necessity:

Until the printing press came along, all books were rarified manuscripts filled with calligraphy and illumination, painstakingly crafted by hand, and only the elite had access to them. In Europe, monasteries were one of the few places that people could handle literature they did not own, and according to Lew Jaffe, a bookplate collector for over 30 years, this created the need for the first known bookplates. “In monasteries that had libraries, they attached chains to the books so they wouldn’t be taken,” Jaffe explains. “But they also created hand-illustrated plates to paste into these books that essentially said ‘this belongs to such-and-such monastery or such-and-such rich person,’ and would include their coat of arms. It was like a warning: ‘I’m a rich person, this is my property, and you’d better not take it.’”