Bookplate is the English equivalent to the Latin ex-libris – which means ‘From the books of’ or ‘From the library of’: a printed or decorative label typically pasted on front endpaper of a book to indicate ownership.

Bookplate design is a recognised artform, enabling humans and technologies to engage in creative conversations that re-write and re-present personal and collective histories into timeless multimodal messages.

Bookplate design, therefore, is an ideal case study to test the theory and practice of evolutionary translation as a form of survival – physical, cultural, societal – that is rooted into the object of the book but extends its spatiotemporal specificities of authorship, readership, ownership.

Unlike adaptation, that subjects the original text to the semiotic and semantic diktat of a new medium, evolutionary translation recognises and retains the genetic quantum of what is original while recreating it into alternative modes of expression that celebrate it and continue it.