a blog by Peter Leonard
Isn’t this a great bookplate? Charles Kofoid (1865-1947) served for twenty-six years as Chair of Zoology at UC Berkeley. A first-generation American, his father’s family came from the Danish island of Bornholm (where the name was spelled Kofoed, a very common last name there.)
There are a few interesting elements in the design. The wooden schooner sailing through the seas at the bottom seems a clear reference to Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, during which he collected many specimens of marine invertebrates. Kofoid himself continued this tradition through the invention of the “Kofoid horizontal net” and the “Kofoid self-closing bucket used for plankton collections in the field.”
The volume this bookplate was scanned from is, in fact, the Danish translation of the Voyage of the Beagle (Reise om jorden). Kofoid collected Darwin in Scandinavian translation, including important volumes brought to Danish through the writer JP Jacobsen.
Finally, you can see the Campanile through the windows of Kofoid’s library. (He lived in a house designed by Julia Morgan, and for all I know this might actually have been the view from that room.)