Most ex-libris from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries had heraldic designs. This was because coats-of-arms were individual family marks easily recognised even by persons who could not read. As heraldry fell into disuse, and more and more persons without coats-of-arms could read and had libraries, designs turned to pictorial subjects. This was popularised in Britain by the development of wood engraving (on blocks of wood with the grain upright, rather than the traditional woodcut on blocks with the grain sideways), and in the nineteenth century by the appearance of a plethora of new techniques for multiplying images.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the collecting of ex-libris became popular, and with it came a great renaissance of interest in and use of bookplates. Isolated collectors have been tracked down to the 1800s, but it was only in the last decades of the century that ex-librism became fashionable. In 1880, J. Leicester Warren, later Lord de Tabley, published his Guide to the study of Book-plates, and eleven years later, the first collectors’ association was founded, the Ex Libris Society, in London, and a few months later the Exlibris Verein zu Berlin. In Germany, a publication of Heinrich Lempertz in 1835 had a chapter dedicated to marks of libraries, and in 1890, Friederich Warnecke published his catalogue of German ex-libris. In France, Poulet-Malassis published in 1874 Les Ex-libris français depuis leurs origines jusqu’à nos jours, and in 1893 the Société Française des Collectionneurs d’Ex-libris was founded.

The beginnings of ex-libris collecting were not unproblematical, for many serious bibliophiles and historians considered the practice of removing ex-libris from books a crime, as well as seeing a difference between scholars and mere collectors. At that time, however, a huge number of volumes of minor interest were being destroyed and pulped to make new paper, and the removal of bookplates from such books enabled the formation of large ex-libris collections, many of which are today in major libraries and museums. The collection of Sir Augustus W. Franks, in the British Museum since the turn of the century, counts 35.000 British bookplates and some 30.000 ex-libris from other countries. The appeal for collectors, and the same is true today as when collecting started, is that ex-libris relate to history in general, as well as to book history and art history, and give the observer an exciting insight into the styles and fashions of graphic design throughout the ages. They are nearly always the result of a commission, where artist and potential owner discuss what the design should be; even if modest, an ex-libris is a work of art, the result of the creative effort of an artist.

The fashion for collecting ex-libris remained frenzied until the late 1920s, when it somewhat waned. This was due to many factors, of which the principal was that obtaining good antique pieces became very difficult, and simply that fashion – always fickle – turned to other easier objects of collection such as postage stamps.