This here is the post-hoc written, English version of a Norwegian talk I gave at the book history lunch seminar at the University of Oslo on November 4th, 2025. I decided to go for an all-analogue mode, fed up with the constant screen-staring, AI infestation, and mind-numbing passivity of most academic presentations nowadays.
The lunch seminar is a relatively informal arena for book historians, broadly speaking. It is held in the communal space in the section of literary studies in Niels Treschows hus, the main building of the Humanities Faculty at the University of Oslo and home to the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages. The room fits ten people comfortably, around an elongated ellipsoid table. There’s natural light through the south-east facing windows. It’s possible to set up a rollable canvas and use the beamer for digital presentations.
It was an unusually tiny audience of three people (November being the month of high work intensity and high sick rates), plus me. With me, I had 24 objects from my collection of Norwegian Exlibris and Exlibrisiana, i.e. publications and documents about exlibris, their collectors, artists, owners, and manufacturers. I used my phone (on silent) for time tracking. I had prepared a couple of cheat cards listing publication dates and the birth and death dates of some of the protagonists I wanted to talk about. They were in randomised order.
I had pre-stacked the objects and put them in a hiking backpack (they are large and cumbersome). Arriving at the scene, I unpacked and arranged them into three smaller stacks to prevent them from tumbling or damaging some of the more fragile pieces. These stacks made up the visual and physical chronology of my talk.
I stood throughout my 90-minute talk and held the objects in front of me (covering my torso), while I talked about the aspect of the history of the Norwegian exlibris they represented. I would then pass them along so the audience could leaf through them, read, touch, feel, sense and smell the objects, at their own pace.
In a series of blog posts, I will reiterate the talk with the objects presented in a bibliographic description and accompanied by photographs.
This is part one.
How I Found the Norwegian Exlibris (Or: How It Found Me)
Object 1
In January 2024, while carelessly scrolling through listings on the Norwegian second-hand market app Finn.no, I came across a post with a picture of the bright green brochure Norsk Exlibrisiana, which offered an exlibris collection for sale, with no price set. The description read:
My father’s collection of exlibris/bookplates and related literature is seeking a new owner. The collection can be “sold” as a whole or in parts. Looking for contact with people interested in Norwegian exlibris and their history.
Thor Björn Schyberg. Norsk Exlibrisiana. Bibliografi over norsk exlibrislitteratur (frem til 1. januar 1975). Exlibris-publikation 113. Exlibristen, 1975. (Previously in the Collection of Rolf Nysted Heier)
I was intrigued and contacted the seller. We quickly agreed that I would come by and take a look at the collection; I was set on buying it, but not without an inspection first.
On February 2nd, I took the metro, walked uphill through ice and snow, and was met by a sweet older man. He had laid out the collection on the dining room table. I looked at all the books and the many cases with exlibris, while we talked about the collection, his father, our professions and that the world is small. I agreed to buy the collection (it was in good condition), and he offered to help me bring it to my office on campus in his car. I arrived at the loading ramp of the University library and moved the collection, which filled the entire trunk of the car, onto the largest trolley, then rolled it into my office.
You know the feeling when you realise you probably paid too much for something that you maybe didn’t really want? This wave of nausea and cold sweat. Shit, that was expensive, and now what am I going to do with all this stuff? It hit me – hard – and I regretted my enthusiasm-fueled split-second decision to buy the collection.
To be honest, it took me some days, or even a few weeks, to come to terms with my purchase and to transform my negative feeling of regret and post-dopamine-rush shame into genuine curiosity about the Norwegian exlibris. I already knew there was little to no contemporary collector activity and almost no publications about ex exlibris in Norway, and I took the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Norsk Exlibrisiana bibliography as a motivator to convert the printed literature list into a digital one in Zotero, my favourite bibliographic tool. I had the book scanned by a colleague in our digitisation workshop, who also ran a pretty good OCR on the scans, and I was able to transform the scanned bibliography pages into the RIS format using anystyle.io. It struggled with the Scandinavian special characters (ö/æ) and the ditto mark (“) for repeating names, but otherwise created a usable dataset which I could expand upon. I planned not only to make the Norsk Exlibrisiana searchable and accessible, but also to add all the newer publications since 1975 to it.
But how did I get interested in something so niche and obscure as exlibris in the first place?
I could say it all started in my childhood, with my grandfather, a prolific exlibris artist during the 1970s and 1980s. Locked in place in the former German Democratic Republic with little chance of travelling and exchange with others, he took to the art form and joined collector circles and got to be part of a rather international, exclusive group of (mostly) men who exchanged art, were patrons of emerging artists and craftspeople, book lovers and collectors, etc. I wrote in another blog post about growing up surrounded by art, and especially exlibris. Suffice to say, I knew from early on what an exlibris was, and whenever I came across one later in life, I had an understanding and appreciation of both the art, the technique, and the craftsmanship. It almost naturally followed that I got pulled into groups and projects around and about exlibris, like when I worked as an intern at the Berlin State Library in 2007 and became part of the Berliner Exlibris Treff for a few years. It was when I moved to Norway in 2012 that I realised there was nothing in terms of a community here, at least not in an accessible way. The Norwegian exlibris remained elusive until I discovered the post on Finn.no and started with a second-hand collection.
Thor Björn Schyberg. Norske exlibris: fortegnelse over 8650 norske exlibris. Exlibrispublikation 102. Exlibristen, 1974. (Previously in the Collection of Rolf Nysted Heier, decorated with many of Nysted Heier’s own exlibris.)
Object 2
Norsk Exlibrisiana wasn’t the only attempt at an overview of the Norwegian Exlibris as a cultural phenomenon in the 20th century. Schyberg, who was one of the most prolific collectors of the Norwegian exlibris throughout the 1940s and 1950s, had, together with the group Exlibristene and librarian Hanna Wiig, created a list of all Norwegian Exlibris which he published in 1974, 30 years after the craze that was the exlibris during the Occupation time and long after the official collectors’ association, Norsk Ex Libris Selskap, was dissolved due to lack of interest. I believe Schyberg’s catalogue of Norwegian Exlibris is as complete as possible, given the private nature of the exlibris and the lack of systematic registration, collection in public institutions, and research that we have.
Nysted Heier used his copy of the catalogue as a tool for keeping track of his collection and added information based on what he had researched himself or kept to himself. Heier and Schyberg didn’t only know each other. They were born in the same year, had the same profession, lived in the same city in Norway, and worked together for many years, both in marketing and advertising. They were both part of Exlibristene [the Exlibrists] before and during the Occupation, and co-founders of the Norsk Ex Libris Selskap [Norwegian Exlibris Society] in 1945. They had regular contact with exlibris artists and had both made a couple of exlibris for themselves. What is interesting regarding the handwritten edits and additions Nysted-Heier made to the catalogue is the exlibris he himself designed and made: the creator was not known/not provided by Schyberg in the catalogue, and Nysted-Heier added his name to all of them. He also glued original copies of his ‘œuvre’ into the catalogue, including a couple of exlibris he made for his family. The exlibris were known to Schyberg and the Exlibristene; Schyberg added them to the catalogue, but why did he not know that Nysted-Heier created them?
While both Norsk Exlibrisiana and Norske Exlibris mark the very end of an era and act more as a memorial candle than a collector’s guide to the Norwegian Exlibris, how did the beginning look? Let’s travel back in time and trace the exlibris craze through the late 1930s and 1940s.
