Whatever you collect or however you decorate, you can probably find bookends that suit (and even match). Oddly, Chinese female lions are shown with manes (or at least a lot of hair.) This male/female pattern shows up more often in stone (or polystone) lions on front porches and gates than in bookends, but whether metal, wood or ceramic, pairs of lions tend to be not wholly alike.

In Ancient China, lions always came in pairs, as they do today almost everywhere, and one was male with a ball under his right front paw (symbolizing the world or maybe a head), while the female had a cub under her left front paw. When I looked at some wooden lion bookends of mine carefully, I first thought they might be flawed, probably because of the wood they were carved from, but I soon learned that the tradition of distinguishing lions is much older and probably influenced by the Chinese. Such mascots adhere to the rule that even giant stone lions shouldn’t be identical. Each is endowed with a distinct personality. Nicknamed Fortitude and Prudence, a much-beloved pair of giant stone lions stand guard at the entrance to the New York City Library. Interestingly, the designs of lion pairs don’t exactly match the angle of one head and the lay of its mane might differ just a little from the other. Perhaps the conceit is that our books are so precious that they deserve to be guarded by the king of beasts! Certainly, they have long been symbols of strength and power (or pride). The idea, apparently, is that lions make good guards. Our ancestors weren’t humorless.Īnother persistent pattern for bookends is the lion.

It’s a Victorian wittiness to use brass books to hold up real books. When you have a pile of books from the library or Amazon, how do you store them? Standing up? Do you use another stack of books to prop the main group up? That’s so common a practice that many old-fashioned bookends actually were made to look like books.

Vintage bookends