University of Virginia Library


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Dust-Jackets, Dealers, and Documentation

by
G. THOMAS TANSELLE

IN JUNE 1971, I PUBLISHED IN THE LIBRARY AN ARTICLE ENTITLED
"Book-Jackets, Blurbs, and Bibliographers" (5th ser., 26: 91-134),
which set out to give a brief history of the book-jacket, to recite
some of the reasons for the importance of jackets in historical research,
and to offer suggestions for recording jackets in descriptive bibliographies.
To that account I appended a list of some 260 examples of
pre-1901 printed jackets, slip-cases, and other detachable coverings. Now,
over three decades later, I should like to add a postscript to the earlier
piece, reporting on developments in the study and preservation of dust-jackets [1]
in the intervening years and providing a new list of early
examples.

When I spoke in 1971 of the "general neglect" of book-jackets, I was
aware that some collectors had for decades been willing to pay premiums
for books in jackets; I was referring to the fact that many people still
regarded them as unworthy of serious bibliographical attention. Most
printed ephemera go through a stage of being disregarded and discarded
before their historical value is recognized; that book-jackets had not
fully emerged from that stage in the early 1970s is suggested by an anecdote
John Carter revealed to me. My 1971 article originated as a paper
that I delivered before the Bibliographical Society in London on 17
March 1970, during Carter's presidency. He had been pleased when I
had proposed that topic in response to his invitation to speak, for he
always welcomed any scholarly development in the study of nineteenth-and
twentieth-century books. He had long been interested in jackets
himself, having located an 1832 example thirty-six years before; and his
discussion of jackets in his ABC for Book-Collectors (1952) had been
ahead of its time, sketching the history of jackets accurately, mentioning
their historically valuable features (such as illustrations and blurbs), and


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noting that the concept of original condition demands their presence,
even when they lack such interesting features. I gave Carter a copy of
my paper a few days before the meeting, and his way of expressing his
satisfaction with it was to suggest that I had justified his advocacy before
the Council of the Bibliographical Society: he sent me a note at my
hotel saying that "there were a few sniffs among the stuffier characters
when your topic was announced (by me, with enthusiasm), as if such
things as dust-jackets were a trifle frivolous—and this should blow them
out of the water." Even allowing for a little over-dramatizing of the
situation, I have no doubt that Carter's characterization of the Council's
attitude was essentially accurate.

I would not wish to claim that no such sniffs would be possible today,
but certainly jackets have come to be taken more seriously over the past
thirty years, at least by collectors, dealers, bibliographers, rare-book
curators, and historians of graphic art, if not always by publishing historians
and non-rare-book librarians. Indeed, Brian Alderson has said
that the date of my article "may be considered, coincidentally, as the
time when disregard [for jackets] began to lessen."[2] The points I made
thirty years ago are still valid, and what I have to say now will not supersede
them. But I can supplement those earlier remarks in three ways: by
surveying what has been written about jackets since 1970; by examining
the role of dealers in calling attention to jackets and thus assisting in
their preservation; and by augmenting my earlier discussion of the kinds
of documentation that jackets offer—the information they transmit and
the evidence they provide for the history of jackets themselves—supported
by an appended list of early examples that incorporates those I
have learned about since 1970.[3] In the end, I hope that these comments
will encourage further recognition of the various ways in which book-jackets


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constitute one of the most significant classes of printed ephemera
and a basic category of evidence for publishing history.

I

The most consequential book on dust-jackets is the most recent, Ned
Drew and Paul Sternberger's By Its Cover: Modern American Book
Cover Design
(2005), which studies the influence of European modernism
and eclectic postmodernism on twentieth-century American designs
for jackets and paperback covers. Its starting point is the "rise of
the book jacket as an object of graphic design" (rather than what led to
that rise); and it notes perceptively that the rise "coincided with the
definition of the field of graphic design as a profession" and with the
dominance of modernism as an artistic program. Therefore the jacket
was in a position to become a "forum" in which designers could "engage
modernism and define their practice" (p. 20). The authors offer a
well-illustrated historical analysis of the evolution of jacket and cover
designs from Rockwell Kent and Ernst Reichl in the 1930s to Chip Kidd
and John Gall at the end of the century, tracing the artistic movements
and cultural issues, as well as the commercial demands, reflected in those
designs. This book caught the attention of John Updike, who wrote a
piece about it for The New Yorker ("Deceptively Conceptual," 17
October 2005, pp. 170-172), thus creating one of the rare instances when
a major author has reflected on book-jackets in a popular magazine.

Other book-length treatments of dust-jackets in the past thirty years
have followed the general pattern of Charles Rosner's pioneering The
Growth of the Book-Jacket
(1954)—that is, a rather breezy text accompanied
by a large number of illustrations, primarily from the 1920s and
onward.[4] There is nothing wrong, of course, with paying attention to
the designs of post-1920 dust-jackets, since they constitute an important
genre of twentieth-century graphic art; but one wishes that jackets could
receive more thorough historical treatments, even for the period covered
by these books and certainly also for the earlier period, when most jackets
were not artistically interesting. Thus Alan Powers's two recent
books, Front Cover: Great Book Jackets and Cover Design (2001) and
Children's Book Covers: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design (2003),


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provide a considerable repository of illustrations of jackets (along with
front covers of books, especially paperbacks); and, being organized
chronologically, they do make a sketchy start on a historical account.[5]
Although the second of these books shows some covers of children's
books going back to the eighteenth century, it pays no attention to pre-twentieth-century
detachable coverings (except for one illustration of an
1830 slip-case). And the earlier book, containing a brief chapter called
"The Evolution of the Book Jacket" (pp. 6-11), devotes less than one
paragraph to the period before 1901 and makes the erroneous statement
that "Only after 1900 did book jackets begin to become commonplace"
(p. 7).[6]

A decade earlier, Steven Heller had brought out two similar books.[7]
The first, Covers & Jackets!: What the Best Dressed Books & Magazines
Are Wearing
(1993), compiled with Anne Fink, emphasizes the artistry,
rather than the history, of jackets and magazine covers, offering a large
number of color illustrations. The other, Jackets Required (1995), produced
with Seymour Chwast, is described by the subtitle on its front
cover: "An Illustrated History of American Book Jacket Design, 19201950."
After a hundred pages of illustrations of miscellaneous designs
(first for fiction, then nonfiction), the remaining thirty pages are devoted
to "The Great Designers," with sections showing the work of E. McKnight
Kauffer, W. A. Dwiggins, Arthur Hawkins, Georg Salter, Alvin
Lustig, and Paul Rand. The minimal attention, in the introduction, to
the early history of jackets (pp. 11-12) accurately takes note of the
"package-style" wrapping used in the mid-nineteenth century but inaccurately
claims that jackets' "aesthetic, or even promotional, potential was
ignored until after the turn of the century."[8] One does not go to this
book, however, for information on the nineteenth century; and its survey
of the great period of 1920-50 reflects a serious historical interest—
as shown in the statement that jackets of these years "are artistic treasures


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every bit as endemic to this modern visual culture as are the great
affiches from 1920s and 30s France, Germany, and Italy" (p. 7).[9]

Recognition of the place of book-jacket design in art history has
led to books about individual designers and to exhibitions.[10] Not surprisingly,
George (Georg) Salter, who had already been the subject of
an exhibition and a small catalogue at least as early as 1961,[11] has recently
been accorded substantial monographs in German and English.[12] And
there have now also been books on Vanessa Bell (1984, 1999), Brian
Cook (1987), Chip Kidd (1993, 2003), Don Maitz (1993), Wendell Minor
(1995), Stephen Bradbury (1996), Richard Powers (2001), and Ezra Jack
Keats (2002), among others.[13] Examples of recent exhibitions of jackets[14]


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are the show Alan Horne organized (drawing heavily on his own collection)
for the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto in 1989,
on "British Illustrated Book Jackets and Covers";[15] a display of American
pictorial jackets of the 1920-50 period at the Broward County
(Florida) Main Library in January and February 1997 (accompanied by
a small catalogue, Pictorial Covers, containing a "Brief History of the
Book Jacket" by James A. Findlay, who treats this subject in more scholarly
fashion than it usually receives);[16] an exhibition of "Australian
Dustwrappers" at the 25th Australian Antiquarian Book Fair in Melbourne
in 1998; and a gathering of jackets (again of 1920-50) on books
with a Chicago connection, organized by the Caxton Club in 1999 (and
documented in an attractive catalogue, Chicago under Wraps, with an
introduction by Victor Margolin). At least two jacket designers, Gary
G. Gore and Chip Kidd, have created exhibitions themselves and actively
lectured about jackets.[17]


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If the preservation of jackets for their artistry is by now well established,
there are of course many collectors whose primary interest is the
verbal content of books rather than graphic art, and for them the reason
for collecting jacketed copies of books is (or should be) simply the fact
that books published in jackets are not in their original condition if they
lack the jackets. We should expect, therefore, to find that introductory
manuals for book-collectors contain a fuller rationale for collecting jackets
than is provided in the books on the art of the jacket. But we would
be disappointed by the books that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, when
there was a flurry of largely unfortunate guides.[18]

The most absurd is Maurice Dunbar's Fundamentals of Book Collecting
(1976). Although he is not alone in being uninformed about the
early history of jackets (believing that publishers "did not begin the
practice of issuing books with jackets until about the turn of the twentieth
century" [p. 55]), his manual is the only one to recommend "improving"
jackets that are in poor condition (they can often, he thinks,
be "salvaged and improved to an astonishing degree" [p. 58]). The first
step is to "place high grade drafting tape along the margins" (that is, the
edges of the unprinted side); next one uses "a smooth porous-pointed
pen to restore the original color"—the preferred pen being a Bic Banana
Ink Crayon (p. 59). The idea that jackets are important underlies this
silliness, but the author clearly has no understanding of what historical
evidence means. When he revised his book in 1980 under the title Books
and Collectors,
the same advice is, incredibly, still present—though he
must have received a few protests because he admits that dealers and
curators "wince" at such recommendations. But he cannot comprehend
why: "They believe that it is better to leave them [jackets] hanging in
shreds" (p. 58).[19]

The other introductory manuals of the time do not descend to this
level, but invariably they are not fully satisfactory in their discussion of


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jackets. Seumas Stewart's Book Collecting: A Beginner's Guide (1972)
defends the integrality of jackets to books by noting that reference to
jacket designs may appear within books (pp. 251-252)—without saying
that jackets are in any case part of what the publisher published. Catherine
Porter, in Miller's Collecting Books (1975), after erroneously claiming
that jackets were not "in common use in Britain or America until
around 1910" (p. 51), warns collectors to "be wary of the exorbitant
prices demanded for early dust-jackets" (pp. 62-63), without explaining
the serious reasons that jackets are "now de rigeur" (p. 51) among collectors.
Salvatore J. Iacone's The Pleasures of Book Collecting (1976)
reasonably states that the presence of a jacket is of "paramount importance"
because it is an integral part of the book (p. 42) but three pages
later says, "If one is going to play the book collecting game, one must
abide by the rules, one of the strangest and most unreasonable perhaps
being the preference for dust jackets." G. L. Brook's Books and Book-Collecting
(1980) asks, but does not answer, the question whether a book
is complete without its jacket and then pointlessly asserts that publishers
should never print on jackets any information that is not also included
within the book (pp. 74-75). Robert A. Wilson's Modern Book Collecting
(1980) takes for granted that jackets are important (pp. 99-102) and
points out that a jacketed copy will sell for twice (and in some cases
much more than twice) the price of an unjacketed copy; but he does not
explain the reasons, which are obscured by his view that there is no
harm in switching jackets from one copy to another. William Rees-Mogg,
in How to Buy Rare Books (1985), similarly gives neophytes no idea of
why the attention to jackets is more than a fad; anyone who believes that
jacketed copies should not bring higher prices is going against the "consensus
of opinion in today's market," he says, and "to disregard the sentiment
of other collectors may be to throw your money away" (p. 67).[20]

However unsatisfactory the treatment of jackets in these books, they
at least show that jackets had become a topic that could not be ignored.
And all the while, new printings and editions of Carter's ABC for Book-Collectors
appeared, with a discussion of jackets that set a standard unequaled


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by the other books. Its original 1952 entry for "Dust-Jacket"[21]
remained unchanged through the second (1953), third (1961, hardcover
and paperback), and fourth (1966, 1967, 1971) editions. For the fifth
edition in 1972, Carter made only minor adjustments, adding additional
reasons for the importance of jackets (such as biographical information
and photographs), along with a reference to my 1971 article. This succinct,
sensible, knowledgeable, and witty account has stood the test of
time and has remained unchanged through the three succeeding editions
revised by Nicolas Barker. The commercial success of the ABC
(with sixteen printings of its various editions called for between 1972
and 2005) suggests that more people—fortunately—have read about jackets
in this book than in any other.[22]

Those who wished to have a more detailed, yet reliable, introduction
to all aspects of the subject had to wait until 1998, when Anthony Rota
included an eighteen-page chapter on "Book-Jackets" in his Apart from
the Text
(pp. 124-141). Rota gives an accurate historical sketch of the
evolution of the jacket from protective covering to marketing device, and
he surveys the characteristics of the jackets of a number of twentieth-century
British publishers, noting the artists and designers they employed.
After mentioning other reasons for being interested in jackets—
such as the "remarkable amount of information about authors" they
may contain—he makes, and then elaborates on, a basic point: "Jackets
are worthy of preservation and of study, even if they present nothing but
the names of the author and the publisher, and the title, because even
such scanty information may provide clues to prevailing literary taste,
economic circumstances, or snippets of publishing history" (p. 134).
Among other topics he treats are the writing of blurbs by prominent
authors and the use of advertising bands occasionally placed around jackets;
and he recognizes that jackets are defective if prices have been
clipped from them and that the switching of jackets is "tampering with
bibliographical evidence" (p. 140). His enlightened approach is epitomized
by the conclusion of the chapter:


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Most standard accounts of book publishing deal with jackets in a few paragraphs,
as if they were of only marginal interest or importance. There is in
fact a strong case for arguing that they are central to an understanding of the
binding and marketing of books over the last two centuries, to the history of
the individual books they envelop, and perhaps most intriguingly, as a reflection
of changing tastes in the marketplace.

For a general introduction to the subject, one can do no better than to
turn to Rota's essay.[23]

It is superior to what had appeared in the glossy book-collecting
magazines, though Antiquarian Book Monthly Review did pay considerable
attention to jackets, publishing two serious articles on the subject
and a number of briefer comments in the 1970s and 1980s. The earlier
of the articles, George Locke's "Dustwrappers & Sundry Confusions" of
March 1979 (6: 102-105), deals with the process of attempting to identify
first-printing jackets when they are separated from the books, and it was
the occasion for two important points to be made. One, expressed by
Locke himself at the end of his article, is that "systematic bibliographical
consideration of 20th century dustwrappers is long overdue." What this
amounts to is a request for fuller treatment of jackets in descriptive
bibliographies, including attention to how jackets on later printings
differ from those on firsts, and there is no doubt that bibliographers
should be urged to pursue and record jacket variations. The other point
came in a letter written by Alan Smith after reading Locke's article and
published in the May 1979 issue ("Jacket Conservation Year?", 6: 213).[24]
Smith calls the discarding of jackets "a refined form of vandalism" and
finds it a "tragedy" that "most institutional libraries have perpetrated
this particular crime" and have thus shirked "their obligation to students


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of the book"; he then calls for "a national archive of jackets," perhaps
to be promoted during a "Jacket Conservation Year." One can
only wish that these points about the preservation and recording of jackets
had received wider attention, and everyone interested in book history
should continue to publicize them. The other substantial article on
jackets in Antiquarian Book Monthly Review came nearly a decade
later, in December 1988, when John Miller published "The Book Jacket
—Its Later Development & Design" (15: 452-461), a thoughtful treatment
of the gradual development of the marketing function of jackets, with
comments on the practices of a number of publishers.[25]

Consciousness of book-jackets in the culture at large, beyond the
restricted circle of the readers of book-collecting magazines, is shown by
the way the subject erupts periodically in mass-circulation publications.
To take the New York Times as an example, one may note that Walter
Kerr's article on retaining jackets elicited a large response from readers.
On 6 December 1978, Kerr published a piece called "Book Jackets Were
Not Made for Stripping," in which he expresses his shock on learning that
the celebrated editor Maxwell Perkins threw away jackets before shelving
books.[26] Kerr himself had always kept them and had given his wife
"a stern little lecture on the rectitude of preserving a book whole, pristine
as the day it was born." His recognition that a book published in a
jacket is not "whole" without it showed more understanding than many
collectors and dealers displayed. And one of his editor-friends, he reported,
saved jackets because of their artistry and the information on
them. Six weeks later, on 23 January 1979, Kerr published another
article ("Book Jackets: Other Readings"), expressing surprise at the
quantity of mail he had received, which reveals that everyone in our
"dust-jacket-conscious society" has "very firm thoughts on this particular
subject."[27] The New York Times Book Review gave attention to jacket
blurbs by well-known authors on 23 July 1978, when William Cole


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wrote about his experiences in the publicity departments of Knopf and
Simon & Schuster ("The Blurb and I"), and on 8 December 1996, when
Pico Iyer, citing many interesting examples, called the blurb "a wonderfully
coded subset of literature, rich with as many subtexts as a
Derridean anthology" and offering "an unrivaled glimpse into the literary
pecking order" ("Jacketeering"). And Henry Petroski, the engineer
who has written about lead pencils and bookshelves, explained his
devotion to jackets (despite the fact that one more book for every forty
could be shelved in the same space if the jackets were removed) because
they are often better made than the books and "do not strike me," he
says, "as ephemera."[28]

Treatments of jackets were not entirely absent from scholarly journals
in the post-1970 period.[29] Serif—the journal of the Kent State University
Libraries—was in the 1970s particularly hospitable to the subject,
as evidenced by Joan St.C. Crane's sixteen-part series called "Rare or
Seldom-Seen Dust Jackets of American First Editions." In this series
Crane gives detailed descriptions of "unusual, variant or rare" jackets,
mostly from the Barrett Collection in the University of Virginia Library
(where Crane was a staff member). What she accomplishes here is not
only to place on record thorough descriptions of nearly a hundred scarce


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jackets from four decades (approximately 1890 to 1930) but also to set
a model of what a careful description of a jacket should entail (involving
quasi-facsimile transcriptions of texts and Centroid Color Chart designations
of colors). All told, she takes up jackets for books by twelve authors,
ranging from Bierce and Hearn to Hemingway and Faulkner, and fourteen
of the jackets are from before 1901. Her admirable work supplements
several author bibliographies and should be better known.[30] In
addition to her series, Serif published two lists of pre-1901 jackets (one
from Kent State, one from Ohio State) to supplement my 1971 list, an
account of a 1791 printed covering, and a note on a scarce Gertrude
Stein jacket.[31]

Two well-known scholars also made contributions to the early history
of book-jackets. Peter C. G. Isaac, writing in The Library in 1975 on
"Some Early Book-Jackets" (5th ser., 30: 51-52), reported (and illustrated)
three items from his own collection that provide early examples
of several features. Two are jacketed books published by Reeves & Turner
(London), in 1873 and 1878, with the text of the jacket for the latter
printed on the reverse of the jacket for the former; both carry advertising
on the front and back, and Isaac notes that the "bibliographical
information on the [1878] jacket [such as the size of the edition] is consistent
neither with itself nor with that given on the copy" of the book.
The third jacket, on Charles Hindley's The History of the Catnach
Press
(1886), displays twelve wood engravings, including five on the flaps.
Twenty-five years later, B. J. McMullin contributed "Precursors of the
`Dust Wrapper' " to the Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia
and New Zealand (24 [2000], 257-266), discussing both the cardboard
sheaths that were common on the literary annuals of the 1820s and


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1830s and the printed wrapping paper that is known to have been used,
at least occasionally, in the 1830-60 period.[32] Besides reporting several
of the former in Australian libraries, helping to confirm their regular
use on this class of book, he explains that an 1860 example of the latter
(on The Museum of Classical Antiquities, ed. Edward Falkener) shows—
more clearly than had been known before—how such wrapping was originally
sealed over the edges of books.[33]

The ultimate test of the scholarly recognition of the importance of
jackets is the kind of treatment they receive in descriptive bibliographies.
Although a few instances of detailed description can be found in
the 1930-70 period, there was also a reluctance to deal with jackets on
the part of some bibliographers, who occasionally expressed their views
with force in the pages of their bibliographies.[34] And this unfortunate
tradition has lingered to mar the work of a few bibliographers of whom
one would have expected better. Edwin Gilcher, for example, in his
1970 bibliography of George Moore, is defiantly assertive: "As dust jackets
and slip cases can in no sense be considered an integral part of the
books they serve to protect and can easily be switched from copy to copy,
they are not noted in the descriptions" (p. xiii). Yet even Gilcher makes
an exception, for an instance in which the jacket designer is named in
the book; one would have thought that this exception might have
caused Gilcher to begin rethinking his whole position, but it apparently
did not.[35] Equally disappointing is Dan H. Laurence's position in what


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is in many ways a major work, his bibliography of Bernard Shaw (1983).
Despite his inclusion of a section of dust-jacket blurbs written by Shaw
(pp. 851-860), he declines to make jacket descriptions a regular part of
his treatment of Shaw's own books:

Dust-wrappers have never figured notably in the collecting of Shaw's works,
though most of his principal books have been issued in dust-wrappers since
at least 1902. . . . Dust-wrappers are recorded only in those instances where
Shaw either provided text, aided in the design, or commissioned and passed
judgment on the finished dust-wrapper. (pp. xvi-xvii)

This statement reflects the outmoded view of descriptive bibliographies
as collectors' guides rather than publication histories. And in any case
it can scarcely be true: surely the collectors of Shaw do not lag so far
behind those of other authors that they have not come to prefer their
author's books in jackets.

Fortunately, disparagement of jackets by bibliographers has not been
an influential attitude in recent years (hard as it is to believe that it
exists at all). And because the majority of serious descriptive bibliographies
of twentieth-century authors has appeared since 1970, one can
now say that the standard treatment of jackets is acceptable (indeed,
often admirable) in those bibliographies where the presence of detailed
jacket descriptions makes the biggest impact. A helpful influence was
the Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography, which began in 1972 with Joseph
Schwartz and Robert C. Schweik's Hart Crane. The authors say,

Dust jackets have been described in greater detail than is common and often
in quasi-facsimile form; this procedure results not from any overestimation
on our part of the importance of dust jacket evidences, but rather from the
belief that the description, if provided at all, should be sufficiently precise so
as to provide bibliographically useful information. (p. xxi)

This somewhat apologetic statement was replaced in the next volume,
Matthew J. Bruccoli's F. Scott Fitzgerald (1972), with the simple assertion
that "Dust jackets for Section A entries have been described in detail
because they are part of the orignal publication effort" (p. xx). This
is all the justification required, and it was repeated in varying forms in
most of the succeeding volumes of the series, which covered more than
a dozen other twentieth-century writers.[36]

The excellent example that had already been set by Joan St.C. Crane


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in her Serif articles (1970-74) may have played a role here; it certainly
underlay her own admirable Robert Frost: A Descriptive Catalogue of
Books and Manuscripts in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University
of Virginia
(1974), which in turn no doubt influenced the thorough
jacket descriptions in another series, the Linton R. Massey Descriptive
Bibliographies, published by the Bibliographical Society of the University
of Virginia (including volumes on Burroughs, Bishop, Warren,
and Jarrell). The Soho Bibliographies have not been consistent, but
one that pays attention to jackets is Richard Lancelyn Green and John
Michael Gibson's A. Conan Doyle (1983); and the St. Paul's Bibliographies
have been similarly inconsistent, with brief jacket descriptions in
Robert Cross and Ann Ravenscroft-Hulme's Vita Sackville-West (1999)
and thorough ones in Gillian Fenwick's George Orwell (1998). Other
bibliographies, not in series, have also sometimes been careful in their
treatment of jackets: James L. W. West's Styron (1977) is an admirable
instance, and Bradford Morrow and Bernard Lafourcade's Wyndham
Lewis
(1978) contains some seventy-five illustrations of jackets (because
Lewis designed most of them).[37] I need not cite more examples to make
the point that descriptive bibliographers are increasingly cognizant of
the necessity for including jacket descriptions in author bibliographies
and that a large body of such descriptions is now in print. Because the
entries for books in responsible descriptive bibliographies become the
standard accounts of those books as physical objects, such bibliographies
can play a powerful role in promoting widespread acceptance of the
idea that jacket details are an expected, routine part of book descriptions,
and thus that jackets are parts of books.

 
[4]

Rosner's book was reviewed in the Bookseller, 11 September 1954, pp. 918-920 ("The
Development of the Book Jacket as a Selling Aid"), and several letters followed (see 22
September, pp. 1052-54, and 16 October, p. 1264). Rosner himself published a number of
articles on jackets (largely on their design); among those not cited in my 1971 article is
"Book-Jackets," Books [National Book League], 295 (September 1955), 149-150. (Letters on
jackets appeared in the same journal several times that year: 293 [April/May], 103; 295
[September], 166; 298 [December], 261-263.)

[5]

They are discussed in some detail by Brian Alderson in the review cited in note 2
above.

[6]

Sloppy writing makes another comment of his harder to evaluate: "Even today,
collecting book jackets is relegated to a class of trivia unworthy of the true collector" (p. 6).
If he is referring to collecting books in jackets, he is clearly wrong, because serious collectors
of twentieth-century books do not now usually regard jackets as trivial. If he is referring to
collecting jackets without books, he is correct that it is not much practiced (nor should it be,
though anyone who encounters a separated jacket ought to preserve it). But perhaps his
statement is merely a reflection of the general unease that people have felt in taking jackets
seriously.

[7]

And recently he published a collection of twenty postcards called East Side West
Side & Other New York City Book Jackets from the 1920's & 1930's
(2003).

[8]

A statement at odds with one made in his earlier book: "By the turn of the century
the dust jacket was the publishing industry's primary promotion tool" (p. [16]).

[9]

Another 1995 compendium of illustrations showing an interest in the artists is John
Cooper and B. A. Pike's Artists in Crime: An Illustrated Survey of Crime Fiction First Edition
Dustwrappers, 1920-1970,
which includes an index of artists (pp. 192-198) and notes
that interest in these jackets "is intense among collectors" (p. ix).

[10]

It is also reflected in the inclusion of discussions of jackets in surveys of design
history: thus Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton, and Ghislaine Wood's Art Deco 1910-1939
(2003), the catalogue of a great Victoria and Albert exhibition, contains a chapter on "Art
Deco and the Book Jacket" by Rowan Watson and Annemarie Riding (pp. 308-311), linking
jacket design with the commercial adaptation of the language of avant-garde art.

[11]

George Salter: A Third of a Century of Graphic Work (Gallery 303, 1961). Even
earlier the Gotham Book Mart had published a small selection of illustrations of Alvin
Lustig's jackets (Bookjackets by Alvin Lustig for New Directions Books [1947]); and Jonathan
Mayne wrote a book on Barnett Freedman (1948).

[12]

Jürgen Holstein's Georg Salter: Bucheinbände und Schutzumschläge aus Berliner
Zeit 1922-1934
(2003), including a checklist on jacket design; and Thomas S. Hansen's Classic
Book Jackets: The Design Legacy of George Salter
(2005).

[13]

Details about these books can be located online in WorldCat, where one can also
learn the locations of some of the collections of designers' papers that contain material for
the study of jacket design. (Other websites with information about jackets can of course be
located through Google or other internet searching systems.) One example of a relevant
archive is the large collection of Decorative Designers papers in the UCLA Library. Archives
also sometimes come on the market: for example the artist A. E. Batchelor's own file of
forty-five of the jackets he designed in the 1920s and 1930s was offered for sale by Lea Valley
Books (Hastings) in catalogue 81 (February 1978), item 28 (£22). (The album of Hilgenreiner
proofs in the 1984 Leach sale is briefly described in part II below.) The 2005 publication of a
collection of Chip Kidd's jackets (Chip Kidd: Book One) was the occasion for a New York
Times article that states, "He put `famous' and `dust jacket designer' in the same sentence"
("The Book on a Graphics Superhero," 3 November 2005, pp. F1, F6).

[14]

The idea of exhibiting jackets is of course not new. As early as 1932 a group of
jackets was lent by Lloyd LaPage Rollins for display in the Department of Art at the University
of California, Berkeley. And a major international exhibition, "The Art of the Book
Jacket," was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1949; it received some skeptical
remarks in The Observer from Max Beerbohm, who said he had seen "many such exhibitions"
in bookshops, where he could "witness a terrific scene of internecine warfare" between
jacketed volumes "striving to outdo the rest in crudity of design and of colour"
(quoted by Horne [see note 15 below], p. 35). The Book Jacket Designers Guild began holding
annual exhibitions in 1948 (other series of annual exhibitions that include jackets have
been held by the American Institute of Graphic Arts—including one on the history of
jackets in 1950—and the American Association of University Presses). A few examples of
attention to jackets in design magazines are Mischa Black, "The Dust Wrapper," Typography,
4 (Autumn 1937), 7-9; "New Look in Jackets," AIGA Journal, 1 (1947-48), 108-109;
and Gini Sikes, "Judging a Book by Its Cover," Metropolis, 6.5 (December 1986), 38-43, 53,
55. Design is the principal concern of William Lowndes in "The Lure of the Book-Jacket,"
Library World, 53 (1950-51), 280-281 (though some inaccurate comments on the early history
of jackets are also included). Examples of discussions of designs focusing on the jackets for
single authors are Keith Cochran, "Jerry's Jackets; or, Uncovering Jerry Todd: A Revealing
Analysis," Yellowback Library, 35 (September/October 1986), 5-12 (on Leo Edward's
juvenile Jerry Todd serits); and Keith Cushman, "Lawrence's Dust-Jackets: A
Selection with Commentary," D. H. Lawrence Review, 28.1-2 (1999).

[15]

Reviewed by Graham Bradshaw in "British Illustrated Book Jackets and Covers: A
Report," Devil's Artisan, 25 (1989), 21-24. Horne later wrote a good brief account of jacket
illustrators in a section of the introductory text to The Dictionary of Twentieth-Century
British Book Illustrators
(1994): "Book Jackets and Covers and Paperback Wrappers," pp.
34-46.

[16]

Despite the awkward assertion that it was "not until the 1920s . . . that the modern
book jacket became a staple of the publishing world." Jackets certainly were a staple of the
publishing world earlier; but whether pre-1920 jackets are to be called "modern" is a matter
of definition.

[17]

A traveling exhibition of Gore's originated at Vanderbilt University in 1971, and he
gave his illustrated talk on "The Dust Jacket in a Dustless Society" at various places. (The
announcement of his appearance before the Pittsburgh Bibliophiles on 18 February 1971
noted, "Part of his slide presentation will show several possible versions of the jacket for
one book, as designed to please the bibliophile, the author, the production manager, and
the sales manager.") Gore published an article, "How I Design a Dust Jacket (When Dust Is
a Secondary Consideration)," in Pages, 1 (1976), 238-241 (one reason for the jacket, he says,
is "To exist as an art form" [p. 238]; publishers pay for jackets because "they can feel. Because
they aren't selling deodorants—that's a book under the jacket" [p. 241]). Kidd's exhibition,
"Mixing Messages," was held at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York in 1998;
his lecture at the Philadelphia College of Textiles & Science on 24 March 1999 was made
available by the College on a videocassette entitled Chip Kidd, Graphic Designer, Art
Director, Writer
(1999). An autobiographical essay by a designer is Michael Harvey's "Book-Jackets,"
Matrix, 21 (2001), 117-125. Books on the principles of book design have long included
discussions of jacket design: for example, there is a section on jackets in the various
editions of Oliver Simon's Introduction to Typography (1945), Seán Jennett's The Making
of Books
(1951), and Hugh Williamson's Methods of Book Design (1956). Jackets also come
up in such reference books as Harold Osborne's Oxford Companion to the Decorative Arts
(1975).

[18]

I reviewed six of them from the 1970s in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society
of America,
72 (1978), 265-281.

[19]

Not every dealer was averse to Dunbar. Preston C. Beyer (Stratford, Conn.) included
as an introduction to his catalogue 13 (1979) two pages of Dunbar's words on "The Dust
Jacket." A more recent article on "Dust Wrapper Restoration," by Robin H. Smiley (Firsts,
June 2001, pp. 47-53), is marginally more responsible because it concedes that "once a
wrapper has been restored, it is no longer genuine" and that restored jackets "must be
clearly identified as such" when offered for sale; nevertheless, it unfortunately claims that
"dust wrapper restoration is beginning to gain acceptance in the book collecting community"
(p. 49), if undertaken by professional restorers who can return jackets to "collectable
condition" (p. 53).

[20]

Two other such books of the period contain very brief references to jackets: Jack
Tannen's How to Identify and Collect American First Editions (1976) simply says, "A
jacket . . . will increase the price of a first edition many times over" (p. 16); and John
Chidley's Discovering Book Collecting (1982) mentions a few designers and illustrators of
jackets (p. 61). (Chidley published a somewhat longer discussion of jackets in October of
the same year in Antiquarian Book Monthly Review ["Dust Jackets," 9: 376-377], where he
recognizes that "The collector who really does want his first editions with the dust jackets
now has logic on his side," only to undercut his point by declaring that "the sensible path
to follow is one's own inclinations.")

[21]

Carter's intelligent remarks on jackets go back at least twenty years before the
ABC: in a letter to the Publisher & Bookseller on 19 August 1932 (pp. 293-294), he pointed
out—speaking of jackets—the need "to stimulate the necessary interest in the historical side
of a very significant development of book structure and publishing practice."

[22]

It is to be contrasted with what appeared in the last editions of books by Carter's
friend P. H. Muir (Book-Collecting as a Hobby, 1945) and his Scribner colleague David A.
Randall (John T. Winterich and Randall's A Primer of Book Collecting, 1966), both of
which assert that the jacket is not a part of the book (pp. 51-52 and p. 117). Herbert Faulkner
West cited an earlier edition of Muir approvingly in Modern Book Collecting for the
Impecunious Amateur
(1936), pp. 35-36, referring to the "dust-jacket mania" and advising
collectors not to pay "a sum incommensurate with the price of the paper for a dust wrapper."

[23]

His comment about standard histories of publishing is borne out by John Tebbel's
four-volume A History of Book Publishing in the United States (1972-81), where there are
only a few scattered references to jackets (and the sheaths on annuals); see 1: 95, 96, 256,
257; 2: 164, 657, 660, 668; 3: 28, 326-328, 379, 445, 481; 4: 441, 442. Tebbel does, however,
quote two interesting remarks on jackets in vol. 3 (covering 1920-40): a 1919 editorial in the
New York Sun predicting jacket-collecting and a museum of jackets ("a Louvre whose walls
will be hung with curious and artistic book coverings"), and a 1920 review by William
Lyon Phelps complaining about jackets (Tebbel's quotations are from Publishers' Weekly
reports in each case, the first from 95 [15 February 1919], 439, and the second from 97
[13 March 1920], 809).

[24]

Several other responses to the article appeared in the "Letters" department. In
May (6: 212), Jeffrey Stern asks about the claim (made in Derek Hudson's 1954 biography
of Lewis Carroll) that Carroll first suggested the addition of printing to jackets, in connection
with The Hunting of the Snark in 1876. Stern's question whether anyone had found
an earlier example was answered in the July (6: 299) and August (6: 346) issues by John
Stephens and Fred Lake, both of whom cite my 1971 article. Another letter, from Peter E.
Dyke in June (6: 259), mentions a 1945 jacket with printing on its reverse relating to a
different book; and E. Davis in August (6: 346) points out that this practice was characteristic
of (but not limited to) the Nelson firm.

[25]

Miller also, in the early part of his article, summarizes the factors underlying the
growth of printed jackets in the nineteenth century and discusses the role of decorated
(attached) wrappers as an influence on pictorial jackets. Other articles in the magazine
comment in passing on the early history of jackets: Eric Quayle's "The Evolution of Trade
Bindings: Part 2" in September 1977 (4: 358-364) discusses the connection between the rise
of jackets and the development of publishers' bindings and recognizes that jackets were not
uncommon by the 1860s (p. 361); and Donald Weeks's "Carnan & Stationers'; Almanacks &
Wrappers" in September 1989 (16: 332-341) regards the stitched printed wrappers on some
early nineteenth-century almanacs as possible precursors of the printed jacket. (That a less
enlightened view of jackets could also appear in this magazine is shown by John Turner's
comment quoted in the text below at note 50.)

[26]

A fact he had encountered in A. Scott Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978).

[27]

He also comments on the collecting of jackets, citing the inevitable example of the
price difference between unjacketed and jacketed copies of The Great Gatsby ($75, he says,
versus $500).

[28]

"Dress for Success: The Dust Jacket as Art, Advertisement and Nuisance," 18 May
1986, p. 21; adapted from his book Beyond Engineering: Essays and Other Attempts to
Figure without Equations
(1986). Other instances of attention to jackets in the Times are
Ed Reiter's profile of the numismatic publisher Sanford J. Durst, who regarded jackets as
an expensive "frill" that are "ecologically wasteful" (13 January 1980), and Bruce McCall's
parodic "Three Centuries of the Dust Jacket" (12 July 1998). (Another humorous piece,
published elsewhere, is Robert Halsband's "Dust-Jackets to the Rescue," Scholarly Publishing,
9 [1977-78], 53-55, which describes his practice of giving away copies of the jackets
of the books he wrote rather than the more expensive books themselves.) A publisher who
had earlier expressed some of the same objections as Durst was Richard de la Mare of
Faber & Faber, who had said in his 1936 Dent Memorial Lecture (A Publisher on Book
Production
) that jackets were an "important, elaborate, not to say costly and embarrassing
affair," the expense of which could be better allocated (pp. 41-42).

[29]

One contribution to Quaerendo—A. S. A. Struik's "The Dust-Jacket: Cloth of Gold
in the Auction Room," 28 (1998), 185-214 (originally published in Dutch in 1996)—will be
discussed below (in part IV) for its primary element of interest (a survey of libraries). The
article is additionally useful for its European perspective and its references to publications
on European jackets; but its chronology of "important dates relating to the development of
the dust-jacket" (pp. 192-195) was out of date at the time of publication. The European
collecting of jackets can also be glimpsed in two English-language articles by the creators
of two immense German collections, both international in their scope: Ludwig Bielschowsky,
"On Collecting Book Jackets," Private Library [then enttitled PLA Quarterly], 1.6 (May
1958), 66-68; and Curt Tillmann, "A Book-Jackets Collection" (trans. Philip Ward), Private
Library,
4.6 (April 1963), 108-109. Tillmann's collection at that time amounted to some
42,000 examples, running "from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present day"
and including four thousand German jackets of the period 1895-1914.

[30]

The citations for and contents of Crane's series are as follows: I.—7.2 (June 1970),
27-30 (Cather, 1905-15). II.—7.3 (September 1970), 70-73 (Cather, 1908-25). III.—7.4 (December
1970), 64-66 (Faulkner, 1924-27). IV.—8.1 (March 1971), 21-23 (Faulkner, 1929-31).
V.—8.2 (June 1971), 27-28 (Cabell, Dos Passos, Frost). VI.—8.3 (September 1971), 29-31
(Hemingway, 1925-32). VII.—8.4 (December 1971), 29-31 (Hemingway, 1926-29). VIII
[misnumbered "VII"].—9.1 (Spring 1972), 31-32 (Stephen Crane, 1895-1900). IX [misnumbered
"VIII"].—9.2 (Summer 1972), 36-37 (Wharton, 1897-1911). X [misnumbered "IX"].—9.3
(Fall 1972), 45-47 (Wharton, 1913-22). XI.—10.1 (Spring 1973), 40-42 (Bierce, 1898-1909).
XII.—10.2 (Summer 1973), 37-39 (Hearn, 1890-1904). XIII.—10.4 (Winter 1973), 35-37 (Sinclair
Lewis, 1912-17). XIV.—11.1 (Spring 1974), 34-38 (Lewis, 1920-29). XV.—11.2 (Summer
1974), 39-40 (Jack London, 1902-07). XVI.—11.3 (Fall 1974), 56-57 (London, 1911-13).

[31]

Dean H. Keller, "Some Early Dust Jackets in the Kent State University Library's
Department of Special Collections," 8.4 (December 1971), 33-34; Robert A. Tibbetts, "Nineteenth
Century Dust Jackets in the William Charvat Collection of the Ohio State University
Libraries," 10.2 (Summer 1973), 42-43; Josiah Q. Bennett, ". . . and other detachable
coverings . . .," 8.4 (December 1971), 31-33; [Josiah Q. Bennett, reporting a communication
from William R. Cagle], "Double, Double, Toil and Trouble," 9.2 (Summer 1972), 44.

[32]

He also reflects on the origin of the inclusion of "dust" in the common name for
book-jackets, noting that the top edge of the book, most vulnerable to dust, is not protected
from dust in the form of the jacket that became standard.

[33]

McMullin quotes a letter from the bookseller Peter Baring recalling an auction
where twenty sealed copies of The Museum and eight of Falkener's Daedalus (1860) were
consigned by the Falkener family. The wrappings on these copies, he reports, were torn
open, and the few that were not destroyed were trimmed to approximate the form of the
new-standard jacket.

[34]

I have commented on the bibliographies of this period at the beginning of part III
of my 1971 article. One not mentioned there is Percival Hinton's Eden Phillpotts (1931),
which contains this comment: "I should like to have included in my collations of each
book a description of the dust wrapper used, only it was impossible to obtain descriptions
of all of them and they are rightly not regarded as an integral part of a book. If the modern
use of them continues they will probably tend to become more definitely associated with
the books they cover. Many of those used on Mr. Phillpotts's books have a decided interest.
The wrapper for `The Bronze Venus' bore a reproduction of a bronze in the British Museum
that suggested the story. `Redcliff' incorporated a reproduction of an old print shewing
the particular place from which the novel drew its title" (p. vi).

[35]

Richard Fifoot did have second thoughts about omitting jackets from his 1963 Soho
bibliography of the Sitwells; in his introductory comments to his 1971 revision, he calls this
practice "an omission I have regretted since reading Sir Sacheverell Sitwell's `A Note for
Bibliophiles' . . . which explains how personal are the wrappers of some of his books" (p. 9)
—though Fifoot does not rectify the omission. (It was apparently Fifoot's comment that
caused Sitwell to reprint the piece, slightly revised, as a separate; see note 60 below.)

[36]

Nor did the volumes on nineteenth-century authors neglect jackets: Joel Myerson,
for example, recorded nineteenth-century jackets for Emerson (1982) and Emily Dickinson
(1984). The main volumes of the Pittsburgh (and other) series are listed in section 4C of my
Introduction to Bibliography: Seminar Syllabus (latest revision, 2002).

[37]

R. A. Gekoski and P. A. Grogan's William Golding (1994) includes eighteen color
illustrations of the fronts of jackets (but does not describe the jackets in the entries).
Donald Gallup, author of respected bibliographies of Eliot and Pound, wrote in On
Contemporary Bibliography
(1970) that "the bibliographer should certainly describe them
[jackets] when he comes across them"—though his own practice was to give only the colors
of the paper and the printing, and nothing more. (His comments on the importance of
jackets, with examples, are on pp. 11-13.)

II

When we turn to the role that dealers have played in the dust-jacket
story, pride of place goes to Ken Leach of Brattleboro, Vermont, who in
the 1970s and early 1980s assembled, and then dispersed, the largest
collection of pre-1901 jackets that has ever been formed (that is, since
the days when they were current). In the first of his 1977 catalogues
(77-1), he announced, "I am trying to build a collection of American
books in their original DUST JACKETS published prior to 1900."
After mentioning his two earliest (a printed envelope of 1848 and a


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regular jacket of 1876), he stated, "If anybody has any for sale I would
like very much to hear about. Or if you have any information about any
early ones I would like to hear about." By 6 February 1979, about two
years later, he had accumulated 212 examples, and in a letter to me
(enclosing a list of them) he said, "I am beginning to suspect that probably
at least 90% of all books published after 1890 were issued in dust
jackets"—a statement he publicly altered the next year by changing the
date to "1880" in a letter he published in AB Bookman's Weekly. The
purpose of his letter was to correct some errors in Adeline R. Tintner's
article "Henry James Writes His Own Blurbs": he noted that decorative
jackets appeared at least as early as 1878 (not 1902) and blurbs as early
as 1880 (not 1906), citing examples. But he acknowledged that information
of this kind was not readily available: "There are probably," he
said, "not more than two or three actual collections in the world. But I
can walk upstairs to my `collection room' and inspect the shelves that
contain over 270 American books printed prior to 1900 in their original
Dust Jackets."[38]

A little more than a year later, in the fourth of his 1981 catalogues
(81-4), Leach offered his whole collection, then numbering "over" 440
items, for sale as a lot for $21,500 (item 82). In his description, he called
it (accurately) "the largest extant collection of its kind in the world,"
noted that it "had been about ten years in the building," and gave a correct
idea of the "enormous amount of information contained in and on
these jackets; the salesmanship (or lack of) of the publishers, the artists
involved, the advertisement information, the decorations, etc, etc." He
also astutely pointed out that the lot was "two collections in one": since
the jackets had protected the bindings, it was also a collection of pristine
examples of late nineteenth-century publishers' bindings. Despite these
valid points and a listing of some high spots,[39] the collection did not sell,
and Leach wrote to me a year later (on 2 November 1982) asking for suggestions
of possible purchasers. By that time, there were about 550 items,
and the price was $26,000.

Another year and a half passed, with no more success in placing the
collection en bloc, and Leach decided to sell it at auction. On Sunday,


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10 June 1984, at Hotel Northampton in Northampton, Massachusetts,
Oinonen Book Auctions (of Sunderland, Massachusetts) offered as Sale
No. 71 The Ken Leach Collection of Nineteenth Century American
Books in Original Dust Jackets and Boxes.
The sixty-page catalogue
contains 608 lots arranged chronologically (and alphabetically by author
within each year), with an author index. Since each entry includes some
description of the binding and of the jacket (or box) and the name of
the publisher, the catalogue is a useful reference tool, as Leach had
hoped. In his introduction he says that the catalogue, which will "preserve
a record of the collection as a whole," "should continue to provide
a valuable sign-post for collectors." Another of his aims in selling at
auction—"to establish a price guide for each individual item"—was more
ambiguously realized, however, for a third of the lots failed to sell, even
at the minimum bid of $5 (they were simply given to the successful
bidder for the next lot sold), and books that were of little interest aside
from their jackets fetched low prices (139 of them brought $5 apiece).[40]
Thus the idea of buying jackets primarily to document their history was
not much in evidence in the saleroom, despite the example set by Leach
himself.

At the beginning of the auction, the entire collection was once more
offered as a whole, with a reserve of $25,000, as stipulated in the catalogue,
but there were no bidders. In the end, the sale realized a total of
$18,632.50—an average of $46.58 for the four hundred lots that sold (or
$26.29 if one eliminates the eleven items that brought more than $300).
The highest price by far, $3400, was fetched by Norris's McTeague
(1899), the other top prices being only in three figures: $700 for Stevenson
and Osbourne's The Ebb-Tide of 1894 (the only Stone & Kimball
jacket known); $600 for F. O. C. Darley's Six Illustrations of Rip Van
Winkle
of 1848 (in a printed envelope); $575 for Muir's two-volume
Picturesque California of 1888 (in unprinted buckram jackets); $400 for
the 1877 edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illustrated by
Gustave Doré; $380 for Abraham Cahan's Yekl (1896); $310 for Remington's
Crooked Trails (1898); and $350-$440 for three Stephen Crane
titles, The Little Regiment (1896). The Third Violet (1897), and The
Monster
(1899). The only other price that was over $300—the second
highest one, in fact, at $900—was for the only lot (no. 31) that did not
contain a detachable covering: an album (dated as "collected circa 18811895")
of some 250 "original printed proofs of illustrated covers and
dust jackets" from the New York firm of A. Hilgenreiner, produced
largely for the Century and Scribner publishing firms.


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The earliest item in the sale was the Darley Six Illustrations (1848),
labeled "The earliest recorded American dust jacket" but more accurately
described (in Leach's words from his note in catalogue 77-1) as a
"printed envelope." The next five lots, from 1851 through 1870, were
books in publishers' slip-cases, not jackets. The earliest jackets in the
collection were from 1875, represented by three volumes in Scribner's
"Bric-a-Brac Series," and only thirteen more lots were for books dated
before 1880—including a presentation copy of the first volume of Charles
B. Turrill's California Notes (1876), published by the celebrated Edward
Bosqui (Leach called this lot "The first California dust jacket?",
but it brought only $110). From 1880 on, the rapidly increasing number
of lots per year reflected the relative availability of such jackets in general:
figures ranged from six for 1880 to twenty for 1888, with the total
for the 1880-89 period coming to 108. Thus of the 608 lots in the sale,
all but 128 dated from 1890 or later (the number from 1899 alone was
seventy). The catalogue therefore offers a good basis for making generalizations
about the widespread use of jackets in America in the 1890s.
But the range of features represented even in the relatively few pre-1890
examples is considerable. Leach's introduction, for instance, mentions
the earliest use of color printing in the collection as from 1878 (for
Bryant's The Flood of Years) and the earliest blurbs as from 1880 (for
Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village). And the geographical spread before
the early 1880s includes San Francisco, Richmond, Toronto, and
Chicago, in addition to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Useful as
the catalogue is, however, it does not come close to having the research
value of the collection itself; the dispersal of so large a group of nine-teenth-century
American jackets is indeed a setback for the study of this
aspect of publishing history. Nevertheless, Leach's attentiveness to jackets
was a notable contribution to the growing recognition of their historical
value, which is a prerequisite to their preservation.

Another dealer that has offered an unusual number of early jackets
(though far fewer than Leach) is Wilder Books of Elmhurst, Illinois.
In catalogue 9 (1984), for example, there were five nineteenth-century
books in jackets,[41] all important but assigned prices that were high for
the time (especially in light of those realized at the Leach sale the same
year): Kate Greenaway's A Day in a Child's Life (1881), $850, and her
Almanack for 1891, $675; Poe's Lenore (illustrated, 1886), $1750; Henry
Demarest Lloyd's Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), $1250; and
Hardy's Wessex Poems (1898), $3500. The following year, catalogue 15


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opened with a section of thirty-nine items headed "Books in Dust Jackets,
1880-1900" (three of which were unprinted). All five from catalogue
9 reappeared here, and except for Wessex Poems they were listed at
sharply reduced prices (the Lloyd, for instance, had dropped to $450).
Twelve of the items were from the Leach sale, where none had sold for
more than $100; their prices now ranged from $100 to $500 (Bellamy's
Equality of 1897, for example, had gone up from $80 to $500).[42] Two
years later Wilder's List 87-A, consisting of sixty items, was entitled
Books in Their Rare Original Dust Jackets, 1881-1915. Half the items
predated 1901, but fourteen of them were brought forward from catalogue
15 (many at considerably reduced prices),[43] and four came from
the Leach sale; of those not previously listed, the most significant were
E. W. Waterhouse's The Island of Anarchy (1887), known to science-fiction
collectors, and Henry Blake Fuller's The Cliff Dwellers (1893),
priced at $685 and $1025, respectively.

The Wilder firm's continuing interest in jackets was further shown
eight years later with its catalogue 72 (1995), entitled Books in Rare
Original Dust Jackets, 1882-1923,
though the proportion of pre-1901
printed jackets had declined to twenty out of fifty-three items. Of those,
three still remained from the 1987 list, and two (not listed there) had
been in the Leach sale. Notable jackets from the early years of the
twentieth century should not be overlooked, such as the 1910 jacket
reproducing Will Bradley's cover design for Walt Mason's Uncle Walt
($150), the 1910 jacket with a color illustration by Harrison Fisher on
André Castaigne's The Bill-Toppers ($175), or the 1903 decorated jacket
(possibly printed at the Merrymount Press, as the book was) on Helen
Keller's Optimism ($250). Other Wilder catalogues have listed early
jackets from time to time, and at least one of them, number 61 (1993),
had nine entries for pre-1901 items, including an 1827 slip-case for the
1828 volume of Forget Me Not.

The English dealer George Locke also deserves to be singled out for
his attention to early jackets. A collector of science fiction and fantasy
literature, he sells and publishes books under the firm name Ferret
Fantasy, and in February 1988 he published a catalogue entitled Thirty
Years of Dustwrappers 1884-1914.
It is a sale catalogue only in part, for
about half of the 159 items are unpriced, marked "NFS" (not for sale).
The primary purpose of the catalogue (inspired, he says in his introduction,
by his purchase of two dozen jacketed books at an Edinburgh


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auction in October 1987) is "to describe a number of dustwrappers of
English language books published during the 30 years prior to the first
world war." Each entry, besides describing the binding, gives a detailed
acount of the jacket, often ending with interesting observations.[44] Altogether
the catalogue contains thirty-four entries for pre-1901 jackets,
five of them for 1880s books, including the twenty-five-volume Centenary
Edition of Scott's Waverley Novels (1885-88, £385). The prices for individual
nineteenth-century jacketed books (as opposed to the Scott set)
range from £15 to £350 (for George MacDonald's Phantastes of 1894).
Early jackets also turn up in other Locke catalogues, such as Q88 (January
1990), which lists an 1886 Jules Verne item. Locke's interest in
jackets has not been limited to the pre-1915 period, however. In the
summer of 1978 he purchased, from Picture Books of Brighton, a group
of about three hundred jackets from the 1920s and 1930s (jackets only,
without the books) that had come from a rental library. His account of
the process of cataloguing them[45] (in the Antiquarian Book Monthly
Review
article mentioned earlier) is a good outline of some of the clues
(such as prices, blurbs, and the dates of other titles) that must be investigated
to determine whether a given jacket is consistent with what could
have appeared on the earliest copies of the book or whether it is clearly
a later printing. Even in the extensive index to his three-volume catalogue
of his own collection (A Spectrum of Fantasy, 1980-2002), he uses
a symbol to mark each pre-1941 title for which he has a jacket.

Many other dealers, of course, call attention to early jackets when
they have them for sale, generally placing a heading (like "In the Rare
Original Jacket") above the relevant entries in their catalogues.[46] And
at least one such dealer, Kevin Mac Donnell (of Austin, Texas), who has
handled a hundred or more nineteenth-century jackets over the years,


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has been assembling pre-World War I jacketed books to form a special
catalogue.[47] For dealers in twentieth-century first printings, jackets have
for many years been a major concern;[48] and it is no longer uncommon to
find such dealers' booths at book fairs stocked exclusively (or nearly so)
with books in jackets. Because dealers who list books on the internet
often provide images, their websites constitute a large (though uncoordinated
and impermanent) archive of illustrations of jackets.[49] One
of the major firms specializing in modern firsts, Bertram Rota Ltd., has
been a leader in the responsible handling of jackets, as Anthony Rota's
admirable 1998 essay on "Book-Jackets" (in Apart from the Text, mentioned
above) shows. The Rota firm, indeed, has sometimes been taken
to task by those who do not understand the significance of jackets: John
Turner, for instance, in his April 1977 column for Antiquarian Book
Monthly Review,
claims that a Rota catalogue shows how "this rather
odd phenomena [of valuing jackets] may have taken root, or is perhaps
being nurtured, in this country and not exclusively in the U.S.A." (4:
161).[50] Dealers who take jackets seriously (like the Rota firm) condemn
the practice of switching jackets as a violation of bibliographical evidence
(a point Anthony Rota makes explicitly); and one is therefore not
surprised to see that his son Julian has recently chaired an Antiquarian
Booksellers Association subcommittee to consider refinements in the
organization's "Terms of the Trade," including the matter of replacing
jackets.

Although Julian Rota's position is the same as his father's,[51] the work
of his subcommittee has occasioned considerable debate, first within the
ABA leadership in late 2004 and then, in early 2005, in the pages of the
Bookdealer. On 6 January 2005 the Bookdealer printed (under the heading
"Code of Good Practice") a letter from Jonathan Potter, president
of ABA, stating that "the Association is now recommending that its
members indicate clearly not only any variance in condition between


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the book and wrapper, but, where applicable, to state that a wrapper
has been supplied from another copy" (p. 9). Two weeks later (20 January
2005) James Fergusson devoted much of his column ("Catalogue
Review") to arguing that switching jackets produces "a sort of forgery"
and to criticize Potter's statement: "it is surely shocking," Fergusson
says, "that the ABA should appear to be condoning or at least licensing
the sophistication of modern first editions." Rather than implying that
dealers may switch jackets so long as they state the fact, the ABA should,
Fergusson says, "be purist in its insistence on authenticity, it should be
rigorous about original condition, it should stand up for bibliographical
truth" (p. 10). This forceful and admirable statement was echoed by
another dealer the following week (27 January 2005): Laurence Worms
said, "The switching of dust-jackets can never be a responsible practice,
whether declared or not" (p. 8), and he added (p. 10) that "the bookseller's
bibliographical duty of care in these matters is actually more important
on the humble and humdrum books that (as yet or perhaps for
ever) fall outside the scope of the full-scale bibliographies" (which offer
"the protection of some other documentation or evidence"). And Potter
himself wrote to affirm that "dust-wrappers must be considered an integral
part of a book" (p. 10). This whole exchange, and its extension in
the ensuing weeks,[52] gives welcome publicity, in a journal aimed at a
booktrade audience, to the fact that switching (or "enhancing") jackets
is as serious a bibliographical offense as inserting or replacing a leaf
within a book.

If jackets are both important and scarce, as well as being integral
parts of the books they cover, one should expect them to command high
prices. Anthony Rota once said, after explaining the significance of
jackets, "For all these reasons my firm has always preached that it was
worth paying a premium to buy a copy in the dustjacket as opposed to
one that lacked it."[53] That the market has followed this dictum in recent


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decades is unquestionable, and one regularly sees notable instances cited
—such as the 1982 auction prices of £75 and £500 for an unjacketed and
a jacketed copy of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale (1953); Biblioctopus's
1984 price of $17,000 for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891) in
jacket; the 1986 auction price of £2600 for Kipling's Just So Stories
(1902) in jacket (called by Sotheby's "the highest auction price, we believe,
for a dust-jacket; the book on its own being worth about £100");
and the 1999 auction price of £80,700 for Conan Doyle's The Hound of
the Baskervilles
(1902) in jacket.[54] F. Scott Fitzgerald jackets have become
celebrated for their high prices, but in fact jacketed copies of books
by all the major authors of the 1920s and 1930s have been steadily rising
for many years. Twenty years ago, for instance, Pepper & Stern (in their
List N) asked $7500 for a jacketed copy of Faulkner's Soldier's Pay
926); but at any book fair today one can see a considerable number
of jacketed copies of books from this period priced in five figures. Dealers
have often made generalizations about the percentage rise in price that
a jacket brings about. Allen Ahearn, in The Book of First Books (1975),
for example, stated, "On the average the presence of a dust wrapper will
increase the value of a book by 50%. On books 20 years old or older the
average increase in value added by the dust wrapper would be closer to
100% providing the dw is in fine condition," though he added that for
Fitzgerald books the figure would be 300-400% (p. 6). Eight years later
the Los Angeles dealer Gordon Hollis was of the opinion that "when a
desirable pre-1925 book has its jacket, it is worth 10 to 15 times more
than a copy without the jacket" (and a post-1925 book is "next to worthless
without its jacket").[55] Some dealers have even worked out charts to
summarize the price levels under varying circumstances,[56] but such attempts
at precision can never be more than vaguely indicative.

Whether jackets are worth the large premium often asked for them
is one of the most ubiquitous topics that jackets have generated, and one
of the silliest. If the price difference between an unjacketed and jacketed
copy of a book is, say, $500, it is pointless to claim, as some purchasers


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complainingly do, that the jacket has cost them $500. The truth
is that the unjacketed copy is simply a defective copy; and the higher
price is what is required (taking the usual factors into account) to buy
a perfect copy. Even if one, illogically, were to think of jackets as separate
items, there would still be no grounds for complaining about high prices,
for jackets would then have to be compared with so-called ephemera,
and important ephemera of all classes always bring high prices, given
their rarity. Indeed, one should be surprised not at how expensive some
jacketed books are but rather at the fact that, in light of their historical
significance and their scarcity, they are not more expensive. Gordon
Hollis, in his excellent discussion of the reasons that justify high prices
for jacketed books, points out that jackets add significantly to the prices
only of those books that would bring relatively high prices even without
jackets. Then he adds,

This standard may change if, in the future, the collector comes to value any
early dust jacket the way we today value any incunabulum; it may change if
we begin to fancy dust jacket art and come to collect `art deco' or `jazz age'
jackets; it may change if we start collecting jackets with blurbs written by
collected authors, no matter where those blurbs appear. (p. 3891)

Dealers can play a leading role in bringing this desirable change about.
They cannot of course afford to set prices that customers will not pay;
but they do play an important role in educating collectors, and the respect
they give to jackets, manifested in the prices they ask, is a part of
the process. Prices support preservation, for items not widely perceived
to be valuable are less likely to be taken care of, and dealers have already
had a major influence on the preservation of jackets.

The pricing of reputable dealers reflects an expert assessment of
authenticity, which is complicated in the case of jackets by their detachability.
But this problem, though perhaps different in degree, is
certainly no different in kind from the task of critically examining
every other feature of books. One point that did not emerge explicitly
from the Bookdealer exchange is that a distinction must be made between
dealers' own switching of jackets and their selling of books that
came to them with switched jackets. The former should be absolutely
forbidden; it should be considered a practice that no responsible dealer
ought ever to engage in. But the latter is impossible to avoid because
the changing of jackets has long been widespread, and still is. Every
jacket encountered on a book should be initially regarded with suspicion,
until a close inspection leads to the conclusion that the jacket is not


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inconsistent with what could have originally been present on that copy—
which is the most one can ever say.[57] When dealers find that books in
their stock are wearing switched (or probably switched) jackets, they
should annotate those books accordingly and report the information in
their catalogue entries, just as they would do with any other defects they
have discovered. Some mistakes will of course be made, but the goal
must always be to present as accurate an assessment as possible of the
status of each book in every respect. Once jackets are understood to be
an integral element in what "original condition" means, all the rest—
both pricing and commentary—follows as a matter of course. The professionalism
of dealers requires that they (along with other bibliographical
scholars) set an example of how jackets should be approached as historical
evidence, just as they have regularly treated other aspects of books
in this way. And there are many dealers who have indeed already shown
this sense of responsibility and thus have invigorated the study of jackets.

 
[38]

Tintner's only source, as Leach noted, was Rosner's 1954 book; Leach added that
my 1971 article was the only discussion of jackets not "written from catch-as-catch-can
viewing." Leach's letter appeared in AB Bookman's Weekly, 65 (16 June 1980), 4642; Tintner's
article was in the 19 May 1980 issue, pp. 3871-76 (under the heading "Dust Jacket
Promotion").

[39]

Including jacketed copies of Norris's 1899 McTeague ("which," he said, "has an
appraised value of $1,000.00"); the 1892 edition of Parkman's The Oregon Trail, with
illustrations by Remington; Remington's Crooked Trails (1898); and John Muir's Picturesque
California
(1888).

[40]

In many cases, the purchasers of these $5 items received two or more jackets (as
many as five in two instances) because the preceding item(s) had failed to sell.

[41]

Plus one more—a large-paper copy of Stevenson's Underwoods (1887)—in an unprinted
(and thus not necessarily the publisher's) jacket (priced at $950); this copy reappeared
in Wilder catalogue 15 (1985) at $450.

[42]

S. Weir Mitchell's The Adventures of Francois (1898), which had fetched $17.50 at
the Leach sale, had been listed in Wilder's catalogue 10 at $400 and now was lowered to $225.

[43]

However, one—Irving's The Conquest of Granada (Handy Volume Edition, dated
"ca. 1870's"—was increased from $45 to $150.

[44]

For eample, the "Remarks" section in the first entry, for an 1886 book with a pictorial
jacket, notes (among other things) that pictorial jackets not repeating the binding
design seem to be "uncommon before 1900, but occur more frequently with children's and
illustrated books."

[45]

Another example of a dealer who has catalogued jackets by themselves (at least in
one catalogue) is Thomas Boss, whose List 984 (1998) contains entries (41, 42) for two
jackets (from 1929-30) with illustrations by Alastair.

[46]

The names of some of these dealers can be located in the index to the appended
list. One unusual instance is Hordern House's 1999 catalogue offering (as item 43) Ernest
Giles's Australia Twice Traversed (2 vols., 1889) at $17,500: a full-page description, including
a discussion of the history of dust-jackets (headed "UNRECORDED DUSTJACKETS"
and quoting my 1971 article), is accompanied by a full-page illustration of the pictorial
jackets on this set. Another example of an entry that goes into the history of jackets is in
Rulon-Miller Books catalogue 88 (1988): item 151, for Howells's No Love Lost (1869), is
headed "Third Earliest American Dust-Jacket Extant" (priced at $3500; relisted at that
price in catalogue 92 [1990], item 108). Priscilla Juvelis's catalogues have included an uncommon
number of early jackets: her List 97-3 (1997), for example, contains six nineteenth-century
examples.

[47]

I am grateful to him for providing me with a list of many of the jackets and slipcases
that have passed through his hands or are currently in his stock. His interest in the
subject is also shown by two articles (based on his own collections) that he wrote for Firsts,
which include discussions and illustrations of several examples: "Collecting Mark Twain,"
8.7/8 (July/August 1998), 24-61; "American Gift Books," 11.10 (December 2001), 26-51.

[48]

One prominent dealer in modern firsts, the late Marguerite Cohn, is supposed to
have suggested that her epitaph might say, "Margie Cohn died worrying about dust jackets"
(reported by Gordon Hollis in the article cited in note 55 below).

[49]

An example of a website showing thousands of jackets is the one maintained by
Between the Covers (Merchantville, N.J.): <http://www.betweenthecovers.com>.

[50]

Another article critical of the pricing of scarce jackets in general is Jim McCue's
"Judging Books by Their Cover," London in June [The Times], June 1999, p. 6.

[51]

As is the subcommittee's, according to Rota's letter in the Bookdealer, 27 January
2005, p. 10.

[52]

In the number for 3 February 2005, for example, Fergusson again criticized the ABA
for thus far not taking a strong enough stand; the organization, he says, should be "straightforwardly
banning a practice which seems, on the face of it, as fishy as the Ring" (p. 14).
Six weeks later the discussion was continued, rather aimlessly, by Robert Brown ("A Bookseller's
Ramblings on the Sophisticated Book," 17 March 2005, pp. 7-9): after several
disparaging references to the prices of jacketed copies (for those who "have the money to
indulge in collecting pieces of printed paper at hundreds of pounds per square inch"), he
suggests taking the position, unless there is evidence to the contrary, that any "book and
jacket . . . cannot be assumed to have met before arriving in the shop, book fair or saleroom"
(p. 9). (I am indebted to David McKitterick for calling my attention to the Bookdealer
exchange.)

[53]

Though he has also said that "the price differential between books with and without
their dustjackets has now reached seemingly absurd levels." See "Trends in the International
Antiquarian Trade," AB Bookman's Weekly, 88 (16 September 1991), 993-1011
(quotations from p. 1002).

[54]

These examples were cited, respectively, in Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 9
(October 1982), 376 (by John Chidley); ibid., 11 (October 1984), 410; Sotheby's Market Report
on Printed Books, Autograph Letters and Manuscripts in London, 1986,
p. 1; and Jim McCue
(see note 50 above).

[55]

"The Importance of the Dust Jacket" [with the heading "Pricing Factor" above
this title], AB Bookman's Weekly, 72 (5 December 1983), 3891-3902 passim (quotation from
p. 3891).

[56]

For example, see D. W. Howard and Ralph Roberts, "Dust Jackets," Book-Mart, 7.5
(January 1984), 21, 26, 30-31; and the table of prices that The Book Baron (Anaheim) would
pay for Alcoholics Anonymous books (AB Bookman's Weekly, 84 [6 November 1989], 1775).

[57]

This is true even in those instances where one can turn to a good descriptive bibliography
for guidance. If the jacket one is examining exactly matches a responsible bibliographer's
description, one has strong support for treating it as original to the edition or
printing in question (just as if one had seen the same jacket on multiple copies oneself),
but not necessarily original to the particular copy in hand. If it does not match, it may
nevertheless be original, for it may be a variant not seen by the bibliographer. One should
also keep in mind that publishers sometimes use up a particular batch of jackets by placing
them on copies of printings (or, less often, editions) for which they were not originally
intended. A rare situation in which switched jackets would be easy to detect is illustrated by
Charles Sanford Diehl's The Staff Correspondent (San Antonio: Clegg, 1931): not only are
the copies of this limited edition individually numbered, but the jackets are numbered
as well.

III

Everyone who has ever seen a publisher's book-jacket—and thus virtually
everyone—knows that such jackets usually carry both a design
(however minimal in some cases) and information. Although not everyone
is necessarily interested in either of these aspects of a jacket's content,
both constitute historical documentation and offer ample reasons for
the importance of jackets and the desirability of preserving them. A
jacket's design may be spare or elaborate; it may display only words (in
typography or calligraphy) or words in combination with decorations
or illustrations. Whatever the design, it shows something of the publisher's
taste and of the style of the times, and it may in addition display
the work of interesting or significant designers and illustrators. As for
the more overtly informational content of jackets, there are several
noteworthy categories: (1) commentary on the book, in the form of
signed "blurbs" (by the author or by other writers) or unsigned sentences


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or paragraphs of description and praise (generally written by the
publishing-house staff); (2) biographical information about the author,
including photographs, lists of books, and summaries of dates and events;
and (3) details of publication history, relating both to the specific book
(such as the price, the size or date of the printing, or a date or name that
supplements or clarifies what is provided within the book) and to other
books (such as notices of related books recently published or, in the case
of books in series, lists and serial numbers of other titles in the series).
Besides these specific items of documentation, all of them taken together
help to document the publisher's approach to advertising.

In my 1971 essay I gave many examples of these various means by
which jackets preserve notable content. To underscore the value of
jackets as historical documentation, I shall simply note here a few further
examples. In regard to typographic design, one need only mention Berthold
Wolpe's jackets for Faber & Faber and Stanley Morison's for
Victor Gollancz[58] to make the point that the full picture of these major
figures' accomplishment requires access to jackets. The same can be said
of the designer-illustrator Warren Chappell, as David L. Vander Meulen
has demonstrated in his comprehensive collection, with its rows of jacketed
copies. He has made the point[59] that a large number of Chappell's
designs, because they were on popular books and therefore can be found
in many people's houses, have become part of the stock of imagery
known to a mass audience, including persons not particularly alert to
graphic art—a point that applies equally to the yellow Gollancz jackets
and many other famous designs. Some of Vanessa Bell's decorations for
Hogarth Press books appear on jackets; and John Minton's illustrative
jackets for John Lehmann, Rex Whistler's and John Piper's for Faber
& Faber, and Brian Cook's for Batsford suggest the quality of the artwork
that can be found on jackets. The drawings by Irene Hawkins for
Sacheverell Sitwell's books were overseen by Sitwell himself, who went
so far as to claim that "they are perhaps an unique instance of careful
collaboration between an author and an artist."[60] The illustrations on


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jackets sometimes do not appear within the books themselves, a situation
that Brian Alderson has noted as a fairly common one in connection
with children's books.[61] Jackets may also include illustrations not specifically
created for these jackets: the one on the American edition of
Pio Baroja's Weeds (Knopf, 1923), for instance, displays a painting by
John Dos Passos (as well as a blurb by him).

Nineteenth-century jackets are not normally associated with specific
designers (understandably, given their generally sparse layout), but
sometimes the designer can be identified: for example, The Pageant of
1897 (published by Henry & Co. of London) notes on the leaf following
the title-leaf, "The outer wrapper is designed by Gleeson White." Although
the designers of the decorative bindings of the 1880-1910 period
have received a great deal of attention, there is a tendency to ignore the
jackets that frequently covered those bindings, since they were often very
plain, but sometimes they reproduce the binding designs. Thus Charles
Gullans and John Espey's Margaret Armstrong and American Trade
Bindings
(1991) gives almost no notice to jackets; but Eunice R. Schwager's
notable collection of Armstrong, which contains jackets for thirty-seven
titles,[62] shows that contemporary book-buyers would have encountered
many of Armstrong's designs first in their usually single-color
and sometimes abbreviated form before experiencing their full
splendor on the covers beneath. She obviously did not intend her designs
specifically for jackets, but one cannot fully gauge the presentation
and influence of those designs without taking the jackets into account.
Other binding designs by well-known designers of the great period of
publishers' bindings also were repeated on jackets, along with their
monograms: examples are W. Reader's design for Andrew Lang's Johnny
Nut and the Golden Goose
(Longmans, Green, 1887), Laurence Housman's
for Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (Macmillan, 1893), Elihu
Vedder's for the Rubaiyat (3rd Houghton Mifflin edition, 1894), Amy
Sacker's for Louisa May Alcott's A Hole in the Wall (Little, Brown,
1899), and Ernest Seton Thompson's for Frank M. Chapman's Bird Life
(Appleton, 1899). In the case of the American edition of Kipling's The
Seven Seas
(Appleton, 1896; noted on the 1899 printing), the designer's


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initials appear on the jacket but not on the same design on the cover of
the book.[63]

Turning to the explicitly informational content of jackets, we may
note that the importance of blurbs has been recognized by at least one
collected edition: in 1980 the Pterodactyl Press of San Francisco published
a volume of Carl Van Vechten's blurbs for his own books (Ex
Libris,
edited by Paul Padgette and Bruce Kellner). This book reminds
one of the value of attempting to discover the authorship of unsigned
commentary, since it may be by the author or by a well-known member
of the publisher's staff.[64] Sometimes it offers a useful supplement to the
book, as in the case of the 1881 American edition of Disraeli's Endymion
(Chicago: Belford, Clarke), where the front of the jacket includes a key
to the characters of the novel; or the Fugitive anthology Driftwood
Flames
(Nashville: Poetry Guild, 1923), where the front flap prints a
concise summary of what the Fugitives stood for; or Kenneth H. Myers's
SRDS: The National Authority Serving the Media-Buying Function
(Northwestern University Press, 1968), where the jacket flaps carry an
"Addendum" bringing the story to January 1969.[65] Among the innumerable
examples of signed blurbs by famous authors, I shall simply
note that the publisher B. W. Huebsch, whose jackets were usually fairly
sedate, went all out to promote Roger L. Sergel's Arlie Gelston (1923)
by lining up blurbs from Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, and Theodore
Dreiser. This combination can symbolize the groupings of signed
blurbs on many thousands of other books and can suggest the ways in
which literary reputations, friendships, and rivalries are reflected on the
surfaces of book-jackets. The more straightforwardly biographical information
on jackets can also be revealing, since the details included in
biographical sketches are likely to have been selected by the authors—


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or written by them, as in the case of Michael Sadleir's signed two-paragraph
statement about "the chief influences" on his work for the jacket
on the American edition of Forlorn Sunset (Farrar, Straus, 1946), which
also includes a picture of him.

Indeed, photographic portraits and drawings of authors (sometimes
not easy to locate elsewhere) are often striking supplements to other
biographical details. One thinks of the famous photographs of Truman
Capote and Gore Vidal, but of course there are thousands of less well
known instances that are equally communicative of the author's character.
A few of my favorites are the photograph of May Sarton by Jill
Krementz (different from the one used as the frontispiece) on the jacket
for Sarton's A World of Light (Norton, 1978); the Leon Kroll drawing
of Nancy Hale on the jacket for Hale's The Prodigal Women (Scribner,
1942) and the Rollie McKenna photograph of her on Black Summer
(Little, Brown, 1963); and the drawing of David McCord by Grace
Thayer Richards (Mrs. James Bryant Conant) on the jacket of McCord's
In Sight of Sever (Harvard, 1963). If one lines up Wright Morris's novels,
one has a whole portrait gallery, for nearly every one displays a different
jacket photograph—sometimes taken by Morris himself, as on The Works
of Love
(Knopf, 1952) and Ceremony in Lone Tree (Atheneum, 1960).
A picture on the jacket for one of an author's books may also be relevant
to the reading of another one. As David L. Vander Meulen has reported
to me from his Peter De Vries collection, Henry A. Hagel's photograph
of De Vries on the back of the jacket for Comfort Me with Apples (Little,
Brown, 1956) includes De Vries's daughter Emily, whose death from
leukemia in 1960 provided the backdrop for The Blood of the Lamb
(1962). All these photographs are on back panels; but B. W. Huebsch
placed a photograph of Joyce on the front panel of the jacket for his
edition (1918) of Chamber Music. The effect that jacket portraits can
have on readers is suggested by a comment of Ted Morgan's in Churchill:
Young Man in a Hurry, 1874-1915
(1982): "On the jacket [for Churchill's
The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898)] was a pensive
young man with thinning hair who, dressed in a morning coat with silk
lapels, did not look in the least like the officer on active duty whose experiences
the book recounted" (p. 93).

The usefulness of jackets in reconstructing a book's publication and
marketing history is illustrated by instances of variant jackets. The first
jacket, in three colors, for J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey (Little,
Brown, 1961) was disapproved of by Salinger, and a new one was designed.
Frank Conroy's The Disinherited (Covici, Friede, 1933) appeared
in a jacket with an illustration on the front and another jacket with
blurbs by Whit Burnett and Erskine Caldwell, among others. Thomas


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Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (Scribner, 1929) also had its first jacket
replaced with one quoting from reviews; and two jackets have been recorded
for Jack Kerouac's On the Road (Viking, 1957) and for Twelve
Poets: A Miscellany of New Verse
(Selwyn & Blount, 1918). An unusual
instance is Paul Goodman's Stop-Light: Five Dance Poems (Harrington
Park, N.J.: 5 × 8 Press, 1941): some copies carry a later jacket, the front
flap of which reports new information, introduced by the words "Being
obliged to replace lost dust jackets we now may note that . . . ." The
survival of proof states of jackets may also preserve variants, as in the
case of advance unbound copies of Thomas Pynchon's Slow Learner
(Little, Brown, 1984) covered with proof jackets.

Discovery of some of these variants has been facilitated by the fortuitous
existence of copies of the books carrying both jackets;[66] but there
are other instances in which books were intended to be clothed in two
jackets simultaneously at the time of publication. The second volume of
the Parke-Bernet catalogue for the A. Edward Newton sale (1941), for
example, was published with two jackets, the one underneath being a
replacement for the original first-volume jacket; a printed notice in the
second volume states that the original jacket was "not substantial enough
to withstand the amount of handling to which the book is exposed."
And Alexander King's Mine Enemy Grows Older (Simon & Schuster,
1958) has an outer jacket that includes the following comment: "If this
jacket (the author painted it) is too strong for you, take it off. There's
a conservative jacket for conservative people underneath." Purchasers
of Billy Graham's Just as I Am (Harper/Zondervan, 1997) were offered
a similar choice, except that the alternative jackets were not on the same
copies but rather were displayed together in bookstores and pictured
side by side in advertisements: one showed Graham (both on the front
and on the spine) in a suit and tie, whereas the other depicted him in a
frayed denim shirt open at the throat.[67] (In the Newton and the King instances,
by the way, and perhaps in the Graham as well, there is the
implied expectation that the books will be kept in jackets.)


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When a later printing of a jacket appears on a first printing of a
book, there is normally good reason to be suspicious, but not always:
some copies of the first printing of the American edition of Dylan
Thomas's Collected Poems (New Directions, 1953) bear a second-printing
jacket (so labeled), but at least one copy is known to have a letter from
the publisher laid in, stating that "we simply ran short of jackets."[68]
Sometimes information appears on the inside (or reverse) surface of
jackets, in addition to the familiar use of that space to list titles in a
series.[69] The inside of the jacket for Bruce Palmer's novel of the Spanish
Civil War, They Shall Not Pass (Doubleday, 1971), prints sketches and
brief descriptions of seven major characters in the book. And readers'
comments on Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory (Viking, 1935) appear on
the inside of the jacket. Instances of cross-references between the jacket
and the book can go both ways: the verso of the title leaf of William
Verral's The Cook's Paradise (London: Sylvan Press, 1948) notes an error
on the jacket, whereas the jacket for John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's
Woman
(Cape, 1969) states, "The author and the publisher
assure the reader that there are no pagination errors in the final chapter
of this story." Among the kinds of information that may appear only
on the jacket, the publisher's name is one of the most surprising; but
the Golden Hind Press reprint of the Biblion Society's 1927 Pasquerella
and Madonna Babetta
(Boccaccio) mentions the Golden Hind Press only
on the jacket.[70]

Even when jackets survive, they often are not intact, and the commonest
kind of mutilation is the clipping off of the price (or the words
"Book Club Edition") from the corner of a flap (or from the spine or
front, where prices more often appeared in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries). Such clipping is of course usually perpetrated by
those who give books as presents, but used-book dealers have also been
known to conceal books' original prices in this way. Although there are
other sources for the price (such as advertisements and publishing-trade
journals), the jacket price serves as confirmation and can document price
changes. Obviously the documentary value of a jacket is lessened when
any part of it is missing, and those collectors who now insist on unclipped


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jackets (when it is feasible to do so) are to be applauded. There are,
however, instances where jacket clipping is done by the publisher in connection
with a price change: the seventh printing (1960) of R. B. McKerrow's
An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students has a
jacket with the price of 28s. printed in the lower corner of the front flap;
the eighth printing (1962) has the price clipped off and a sticker with
the price of 30s. affixed nearby.[71] Some publishers have also abetted clipping
by printing a diagonal dotted line at the corner of the flap where
the price is given or where a concise or coded identification of the book
is placed (enabling booksellers to get credit for unsold copies by simply
clipping those corners and sending them to the publisher).[72] Jackets with
these various features bear witness to marketing history with a level of
detail probably not available elsewhere.

Further insight into marketing history is afforded by jackets supplied
by bookseller-distributors rather than the original publishers: I have a
copy of Pio Baroja's Youth and Egolatry (Knopf, 1920) in a printed jacket
with the spine imprint of the Chicago bookseller-publisher Argus Books;
its spine and front panel give the title and author, but its other surfaces
list other publishers' books that were available from Argus. Even the


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number of surviving copies of jackets for particular books, especially if
they are in fine condition, can in itself be evidence of publishing history:
that certain books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
are found in jackets more frequently than one might expect suggests that
publishers' stocks of those books were not quickly exhausted and that
new copies of the original printings were still being sold many years after
publication. (The dealer Cedric L. Robinson indicated in a 1977 catalogue
that he could supply "new copies" in jacket of an 1885 Lippincott
book, Gabriel Harrison's John Howard Payne.) As with any other class
of historical evidence, there is no way of predicting all the kinds of information
that book-jackets may reveal or corroborate when examined
in context by a knowledgeable person.

 
[58]

The importance of Morison's work for Gollancz is discussed in Sheila Hodges,
Gollancz: The Story of a Publishing House, 1928-1978 (1978, in a jacket designed by Wolpe),
pp. 29-30: "Together Morison and Victor [Gollancz] evolved a form of typographical jacket
design that became one of the most brilliant and successful innovations in publishing in
this century."

[59]

In an illustrated lecture given in Charlottesville (for the Bibliographical Society in
March 2004 and Rare Book School in June and July 2004) and in New York (for the Typophiles
in December 2004 and the Grolier Club in January 2005).

[60]

In A Note for Bibliophiles (1976), a revised version of an essay that first appeared in
Cameo, 1 (Spring 1954), 76-85. On the opening page, he also laments the fragility of jackets
("unspoilt copies of them are now very difficult to find") and states, "The degree of care and
trouble put into their preparation by both artist and author should make them, I hope,
more deserving of attention than much of the ephemera of the day and year." See also note
35 above.

[61]

"Bibliography and Children's Books: The Present Position," Library, 5th ser., 32
(1977), 203-213 (see p. 212, where he says that the jacket "may often extend by one or more
illustrations—usually in color—the illustrator's contribution to the book").

[62]

There are many more jackets in her collection, counting all those on successive
printings of particular titles. Most of Ethel Reed's many books and a few others with
Armstrong bindings were also published in boxes carrying her binding designs; the
Schwager collection has fourteen titles in boxes.

[63]

Any serious collector of nineteenth-century publishers' bindings, from any part of
the century, is likely to amass in the process a collection of jackets as well: Ellen K. Morris
and Edward S. Levin, whose major collection of bindings is the basis for their The Art of
Publishers' Bookbindings 1815-1915
(2000), have nearly a hundred nineteenth-century
printed jackets and slip-cases (counting continental European examples as well as British
and American ones). (I am grateful to Levin for providing me with his and Morris's thorough
catalogue entries for these jackets and slip-cases.)

[64]

One of the most famous staff-writers of blurbs is T. S. Eliot, who wrote them for
many Faber & Faber books. In the Hand-List of the Literary Manuscripts in the T. S. Eliot
Collection Bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge by John Davy Hayward in 1965
(1973),
entry P40 records three Faber catalogues marked by Eliot to indicate his authorship of some
of the comments, along with a copy of the Faber edition of William Saroyan's Get Away
Old Man
(1946) inscribed by Eliot to Hayward with the words "Signed for you by the blurb
writer" (p. 19).

[65]

A special case of writing by the author on a jacket is the reproduction of part of
Hardy's manuscript on the front of the jacket for The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of
Cornwall
(London: Macmillan, 1923).

[66]

In three of these examples: the double-jacketed Salinger was listed in In Our Time
Catalogue 65 (April 1976), item 78 ($300), where it was called "the only copy to appear on
the market"; the Conroy showed up in Gotham Book Mart Quick List 78, item 27 ($100);
and the Kerouac was in the Goodwin sale (cited by George Bixby in "First Editions," Book
Collector's Market,
3.4/5 [September/October 1978], 30-31). As for the Wolfe, Jeffrey
Thomas's catalogue 1 (1982) offered a copy in the "first state" of the jacket (item 49, $900);
the Twelve Poets was listed in G. F. Sims's catalogue 93 (1976), item 146 (which says that
only twelve copies came out in the original jacket, with its typographical error); the
Goodman was brought to my attention by the late Richard Colles Johnson; and the Pynchon
was listed in Waiting for Godot Books catalogue 37 (1998), item 1553 ($1500).

[67]

An advertisement showing both jackets is in Christianity Today, 16 June 1997,
p. 7. I am grateful to David L. Vander Meulen and Elizabeth Lynch for providing the
information about the Graham book.

[68]

Such a copy is listed in Van Allen Bradley's catalogue 44 (1977), item 552. A similar
situation was reported to me by John Lancaster: the Holt firm about 1990 had on hand
nine copies of the sixth printing of Robert Frost's 1930 Collected Poems, two of which
wore an earlier form of the jacket and the other seven a later form.

[69]

The reverse was also sometimes used to print the jacket text for a different book—a
paper-saving practice especially employed during World War II. (See also note 24 above.)

[70]

The Verral example comes from Peggy Christian's catalogue 12 (1980), item 354;
the Fowles from John Chidley in Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 9 (October 1982), 377;
and the Boccaccio from information given to me by David L. Vander Meulen.

[71]

The McKerrow book also offers evidence of how such a price change can have
further bibliographical significance: David L. Vander Meulen reports that the sequence of
the taller and shorter forms of what is labeled the 1951 printing is suggested by the fact
that the taller one has the printed price of 25s. and that the shorter one has a sticker for
28s. next to a clipped corner. Of course, publishers sometimes simply placed stickers over
the prices, without clipping. When prices are printed on the spines or fronts of jackets,
clipping is obviously harder; but one does encounter copies with such prices cut out rather
than covered up (sometimes no doubt by a purchaser who bought the book as a gift instead
of by the publisher).

[72]

An example on a Dutton jacket of 1947 (on Van Wyck Brooks's The Times of Melville
and Whitman
) was reported by Barbara Heritage on the internet discussion group
ExLibris (<exlibris@library.berkeley.edu>), 25 April 2005; the next day Kevin Mac Donnell
responded with comments on publishers' methods for dealing with booksellers' returns and
for keeping track of specific copies. (I am grateful to Terry Belanger for calling my attention
to the discussion of jackets that occurred on ExLibris in April and May 2005 and to Mac
Donnell for announcing my interest there.) Another kind of situation in which a publisher
was responsible for price-clipping has been reported by B. J. McMullin: British publishers'
colonial issues were sometimes identified only on the jackets, and he cites an example of
the words "Macmillan's Overseas Library" being stamped next to price-clipped jacket
corners ("Bell's Indian and Colonial Library," Biblionews and Australian Notes & Queries,
31.1 [March 2005], 3-32 [see pp. 5-6]). And David L. Vander Meulen's jacketed copies of
David Cornel DeJong's Around the Dom (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964) reveal that the
publisher placed different prices at the two right-hand corners of the front flap in order to
enable the same jacket (with one corner clipped) to serve two markets. One copy of the
jacket, with the bottom corner (and lower price) clipped, but leaving a slight trace of
printing, is on a book with a centered vignette on the front cover of the binding; another
copy of the jacket, with the upper corner (and higher price) clipped, has a "Holt Library
Edition" sticker affixed and is on a book with full pictorial binding (matching the illustration
on the jacket, but with "Holt Library Edition" added).

IV

Besides disseminating graphic design, transmitting information, and
simply being an element in the original published form of a book, every
jacket plays its role in documenting the history of book-jackets in general.
The account of the early development of the jacket that I offered
in 1971 was based primarily on a sampling of only 262 items through
1900; I now know of more than that number just through 1890 (half
again as many), and the number from the next decade is close to a
thousand.[73] But I need not retell the story in detail, for the outline remains
the same. There were the sheaths (slip-cases open at one or both
ends) that covered the literary annuals, gift books, and pocket diaries
during the last years of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth
centuries. Then by the 1830s came printed wrappings that were sealed
to cover all edges of books—a style that persisted at least through the
1860s, simultaneously with the emergence of jackets with flaps. The
latter form—that is, the one that became standard—carried little printing
in general during the nineteenth century, often only on the spine (or
the spine and front panel), though there were early examples in which
advertising appeared on the back and illustrations on the front and back
(the flaps were not much used for printing until the 1890s). Although
jackets of the 1890s and the first decade or so of the twentieth century
frequently had decorations or illustrations, those embellishments were
generally derived from, if not actual reproductions of, the binding designs;
and the jackets were clearly secondary to the bindings from the
point of view of design and still largely served as protection for the
elaborate bindings, though with a marketing function showing up in


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many instances. It was not until the second decade of the twentieth
century that publishers' bindings began to grow plainer and the jackets
more decorative.

If this familiar story is not altered by the knowledge of a larger
number of nineteenth-century jackets, there are nevertheless several contributions
made by the expanded list, in addition to serving as a nucleus
to which additional examples can be added. One is simply that the story
now rests on a broader base of evidence. Second, by providing some help
in the task of locating and examining a larger number of early jackets,
the new list can encourage further study and potentially support additional
insights. Third, it permits more detailed conclusions about the
practices of some publishers and thus allows one to postulate the existence
of jackets for certain books at the time of their publication, even
when none are known to have survived. If, for example, one wondered
whether Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (Smith, Elder, 1886) or the
hardcover issue of Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (Harper, 1890)
originally appeared in jackets, one could consult the list and feel fairly
certain in the first case and quite certain in the second that these books
were published in jackets (since the list records a Smith, Elder book in
1882 and one in 1885 and shows eight Harper books in 1890). And when
one book from a series or set is listed (such as a volume of the Longman
"Badminton Library" from 1888 or the Warne "Chandos Classics" from
1889) one can sensibly believe that the others also once had jackets or
boxes.

Although such an exercise provides useful support for a surmise, one
could argue that the range of examples in the list as a whole may give
one some reason to suppose that any book from a major firm after the
mid-1870s or so is probably more likely than not to have been published
in a jacket. The list can serve these various purposes even though it is
not a systematic attempt at a census of all surviving examples of early
British and American publishers' detachable book-coverings. It is simply
a list of those that have come to my attention during more than thirty-five
years (including, that is, those in my 1971 list as well as those encountered
since), and there are unquestionably many hundreds more
that I have not learned about. But even if the total is two or three times
the present number, what is now known constitutes a significant mass
of evidence for studying an extremely scarce and widely scattered body
of material. A few observations not made in 1971 are therefore in order.[74]


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It seems reasonably certain that the earliest detachable coverings enclosing
publishers' bindings were the sheaths that came with pocket diaries
beginning in the late eighteenth century and with children's doll-dressing
books beginning about 1810. Examples of the former are known
for The Royal Repository, or Polite Pocket Diary for 1796 (London: J.
Evance and W. Richardson, 1795) and The American Ladies & Gentlemans
Pocket Almanac and Belles Lettres Repository
for 1802 (New York:
David Longworth, 1801); examples of the latter from 1810 to 1814
survive for a number of the little books with loose paper-dolls and costumes
published by S. & J. Fuller at their Temple of Fancy. The
German Taschenbuch of this period, with sheaths sometimes printed
with calendars, was probably the model, at least for the diaries.
Thus when in 1822 the London publisher Rudolph Ackermann, drawing
on his knowledge of the German custom, set in motion the vogue for
annual gift books in the English-speaking world by publishing the first
number of the Forget Me Not, there was already a precedent for enclosing
annuals in sheaths. For nine years, through the volume for 1831
(1830), Ackermann published the Forget Me Not in sheaths, as confirmed
and explained by the Gentleman's Magazine review of the volume
for 1832. According to the reviewer, Ackermann considered the
glazed-paper-over-board covers no longer "worthy of this great age of
improvement" and therefore had begun to clothe the annual "in the
splendid but durable attire of crimson silk, which supersedes the necessity
of a pasteboard case, as heretofore, to protect it from the soil of a
dusty table."[75] Many of the other annuals, on both sides of the Atlantic,
also employed sheaths during the 1820s. Although the number of examples
in my list is small, comprising (in addition to eight volumes of
the Forget Me Not) only sixteen instances, they are distributed among
eleven annuals published in Boston and Philadelphia as well as London,
and thus they imply a fairly widespread and regular use. Certainly the
sheath of the literary annual, which was an extremely popular genre,
gave prominence to the idea of a detachable publisher's covering, and


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one can agree with Ruari McLean that it "can be called the progenitor
of the book-jacket, since its function was to attract and protect."[76]

The next step was the use of printed wrapping paper rather than
sheaths to cover copies of annuals; the paper—printed with identifying
text—was sealed around each book, enclosing it completely. Although
the earliest examples known are on British annuals, The Keepsake for
1833 (Longman) and The Juvenile Scrap-Book for 1845-50 (Fisher, then
Jackson), this style of covering was also used for other kinds of books at
least through the 1860s. Surviving examples are understandably scarce,
since these wrappings were likely to have been destroyed in the process
of removing them in order to open the books. But a survivor on a book
published by Appleton (New York) and Whitaker (London) in 1857
(Richard S. Gedney's Poetical Works), two others on books published
by Longman in 1860 (Edward Falkener's Daedalus and The Museum of
Classical Antiquities
), and one on a book published by the Catholic
Publication Society (New York) in 1869 (Aubrey De Vere's Irish Odes)
suggest—since at least two of the publishers of these books were major
trade firms—that the practice had a continuing life even after jackets
with flaps began to be used. Indeed, sealed wrapping is not unknown in
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: at least one number of
Bradley His Book (no. 3, July 1896) was wrapped in glassine printed with
the notice that it was to be unsealed only by the owner; and Oliver
Herford and John Cecil Clay's Happy Days (Kennerley, 1917) came
completely sealed in unprinted glassine.[77] The covers were of course
visible through the glassine, which was thus a forerunner of shrink-wrapping.

Other forms of coverings—related to sealed wrappings in that they
cover books more fully than the now traditional jackets with flaps do—
have been used over the years for certain types of books. For pamphlets
or thin books, the equivalent of a slip-case may seem more like an envelope.
The earliest item in my list is a four-flapped wrapping (like the
eighteenth-century mailing covers) around a 1791 Philadelphia pamphlet
by John William Gerar de Brahm, with a 115-word presentation
epistle (to be signed by the author) printed on the inside, where the
pamphlet would lie. One might also best describe as an envelope the


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covering for the 1848 publication of F. O. C. Darley's Six Illustrations
of Rip Van Winkle.
And some of Kate Greenaway's small books for children—judging
from surviving examples of her Almanack for 1890 and
1891 (Routledge)—were provided with mailing envelopes.[78] (Of course,
publishers' envelopes—sometimes unprinted—for pamphlets, especially
those intended as gifts, continued to appear in the twentieth century, as
on some of the Paul Elder booklets.) Another variation was to have three
flaps at both front and back, so that a flap could fold over each edge of
the covers (tops and bottoms as well as fore-edges): an 1878 example is
a cloth jacket (now in the Bodleian) on William Stirling Maxwell's
Antwerp Delivered in MDLXXVII (Edinburgh: David Douglas). A possible
example, on Herbert Kleist's copy of Love Poems and Sonnets by
"Owen Innsly" (Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1883), may instead be another
instance of what was once a sealed wrapping, since the flaps are less than
an inch wide and may well have originally been pasted together to cover
the edges of the sheets of the book.

In fact, some of the survivors among previously sealed wrappings are
presently soiled, folded, or cut in such a way as to indicate that they
survived by being forced to fit the book in the fashion of present-day
jackets with flaps, so that they could continue to be used to protect the
books during reading. On occasion publishers even encouraged readers
to engage in this practice: a surviving jacket (in the Leach sale, lot 65)
for John E. Wheelock's In Search of Gold (New York: Thompson, 1884)
has a front flap printed with the words "Cut open at this line and use
wrapper for outside cover." The activity of converting wrappings to
jackets calls to mind the fact that models for jackets with flaps certainly
existed in the early nineteenth century, whether or not they were used
by publishers (and they may well have been), for the circulating libraries
placed books in jackets printed with their names and the rules their
members were supposed to follow. Thanks to Michael Zinman, I can
report three American examples: one for the Glazier, Masters & Co.
Circulating Library (Hallowell, Maine), with the printed date of October
1828; another for Roorbach's Circulating Library (Charleston, S.C.),
which includes an advertisement for Roorbach's book and stationery
store (this jacket is presently on the December 1831 issue of the London


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Ladies Magazine); and a third for the Free Library of the General Society
of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York.

Circulating-library books obviously needed protection, but there is
evidence that individual owners also wished to protect their books,
sometimes using wallpaper or other decorated paper for the purpose.[79]
The rise of cloth binding clearly produced the urge to protect those
bindings, and manufacturers were glad to satisfy this demand with ready-made
covers of varying sizes. By at least the 1870s the London firm of Marcus
Ward & Co. Limited was selling "Marcus Ward's Adaptable Book
Covers, (registered) for Book Clubs, Lending Libraries, Schools and
Home Use." Available in seven-, eight-, and nine-inch sizes, at one shilling
per dozen, these covers were made of patterned paper with a blank space
on the spine for lettering. In America, Sherwood's of New York made for
P. F. Van Everen "The `Van Everen' Self-Fitting Adjustable Book Covers"
(patented 14 February 1888), advertised as "the Aristocrat of book covers"
and as "the standard of perfection since extra covers came into use";
they were offered in three sizes made of "heavy craft paper which sheds
water and is impervious to moisture," with flaps to be folded over all
edges and glued according to detailed instructions printed on the jacket
("leaving no part exposed, even on flat juveniles"). Discounts were available
for libraries and schools, and "Van Everen's perforated and gummed
numbers & alphabets" could also be purchased, so that titles and dates
could be affixed to the jackets.[80] The existence of this kind of product
should not be taken to indicate that publishers' jackets were uncommon;
rather, the emphasis on the durability and protective features of these


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"extra covers" seems designed to suggest their superiority to the fragile
and easily detached jackets provided by publishers. Many individuals no
doubt made their own jackets instead of buying such products, and one
can never be sure whether a plain (unprinted) jacket on a nineteenth-century
book was placed there by an owner, perhaps to replace a damaged
printed jacket, or by the publisher—except in those rare cases
where one encounters a number of copies in identical jackets.[81] That
is why I have limited my list of early jackets to ones that are printed, but
there are many examples of plain jackets that one is tempted to believe
are actually publishers' jackets.[82]

Although in assembling my list I have recorded only British and
American examples, it is important to be aware of the European context,
as the relation of the slip-cased Taschenbuch to the form of the
English-language annuals suggests.[83] Sheaths continued to be used for
French as well as German annuals for several decades,[84] but sheaths and


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boxes were sometimes used to house other kinds of books as well.[85] At
least as early as 1839 modern-style paper jackets were apparently in use
in Germany. Jerome E. Anderson reported to me in 1971 a copy of an
1839 Bädeker book, Friedrich Hoffmann's Funfzig Räthsel und Bilder
für Kinder von 8-12 Jahren,
in a jacket of pink porous paper printed on
the front (title), spine (title, author, decoration), and back (list of other
titles). And by the 1860s and 1870s there are such examples as Chamisso's
Peter Schlemihl (Leipzig, 1860), Lessing's Nathan der Weise (Berlin,
1868, with the date on the jacket), Karl Wilhelm Osterwald's Erzählungen
aus der alten deutschen Welt für Jung und Alt
(Halle, 1868, with
the date on the jacket), Album für Deutschlands Töchter (7th ed.; Leipzig,
1871), and Hessel Gerritsz's The Arctic North-East and West Passage
(Amsterdam, 1878). Eric Quayle, whose collection contained a copy of
the Osterwald jacket in 1971, called it "The earliest printed dust-wrapper
that can be dated with certainty. . . . No printed dust-wrapper manufactured
earlier . . . is known to have survived." This comment (if we exclude
slip-cases and wrappings that enclose books completely) could
rather be applied to the 1839 Hoffmann jacket, which—as far as my
knowledge goes—precedes the earliest reported English modern-style
jackets by about two decades.[86]

The Hoffmann jacket makes clear that the idea of using the back
panel for advertising occurred early, and it reminds one that the earliest


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known English paper book-covering, for the 1833 Keepsake, also has an
advertisement on the back. In light of the many nineteenth-century
jackets that have printing only on the spine, or the spine and front
panel, one may be surprised by these early instances of advertising on
the back. But one should remember that there was a model ready to
hand in the form of the advertisements and testimonials printed on the
covers of some books in the boards-and-label period spanning the last
years of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth
century. Although those covers were not readily detachable, publishers
assumed that many owners would regard them as temporary and have
them replaced with leather bindings. As coverings that were truly detachable
and dispensable came to be used over bindings that were meant
to be retained, it would have been natural to continue the practice of
placing advertising in the same visible position, as the 1833 Keepsake
and the 1869 Magnolia (New York: Leavitt) did. But the custom was
clearly not universal (nor was it, of course, on the printed boards earlier):
examples are known from major publishers in the 1870s (Lee & Shepard,
Putnam, Routledge) and onward, but there is a large number of surviving
jackets from the 1870-1900 period with blank back panels.

This observation reinforces the point (which I made in 1971) that
the use of jacket surfaces in the second half of the nineteenth century
does not display a steady general development but rather reflects the
practices of individual publishers. John Carter was saying much the
same thing in his historic letter to the Publisher and Bookseller (19
August 1932) when he noted that the 1860 jacket for Pilgrim's Progress
"is so far from looking primitive that it would not look out of place on
a book published to-day." Although one can locate jackets of the 1880s
with printing on the front, spine, back, and even the flaps,[87] one also
finds (for example) many Harper and Houghton Mifflin jackets of the
1890s printed only on the spines. Similarly, the retail price was often
included on jacket spines or fronts from the 1870s through the 1910s,[88]
or on flaps (I know of Lothrop examples from 1888 and 1895), or on box
labels (Macmillan, 1894); but often the price is not given at all on jackets
of this period. The indication of the number of copies in print also


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appeared fairly early (an 1874 example is "Fourteenth Thousand" on
the jacket for Poe's poems in Griffin's "Emerald Series"; and a later
printing of an 1883 Revell book, Hannah Whitall Smith's The Christian's
Secret of a Happy Life,
carried a jacket proclaiming "Thirty-Fifth
Thousand"); but the practice does not seem to have become common
in the nineteenth century. Illustrations, too, were used at least as early
as 1860 (on the Longman edition of Pilgrim's Progress) but were not a
regular feature of nineteenth-century jackets. And binding designs were
repeated on jackets by some publishers in the 1860s (Jonathan Couch's
The History of the Fishes of the British Islands, published in London
by Groombridge & Sons in 1862-65, and The Bryant Festival at "The
Century,"
published by Appleton in 1865); but many books with interesting
bindings in the 1890s have unattractive typographic jackets.
Among the few general trends that can be asserted with some confidence
is the dominance of the modern-style flapped jacket over other types of
covering by at least the mid-1860s. Another, as I suggested earlier, is that
such jackets were as commonly used by publishers during the last quarter
of the nineteenth century as they were during the twentieth century. I
base this conclusion not simply on the number of surviving examples
but also on the fact that most of the major British and American publishers
are repeatedly represented, with a wide range of types of books, as well
as many smaller publishers from a variety of geographical locations.[89]

Just as the nineteenth century began with gift books in slip-cases, so
the end of the century saw a similar phenomenon. The books were not
annuals but rather popular novels, classics, and travel books that could
be marketed in fancy illustrated editions, frequently in two volumes;
and the slip-cases were not sheaths but boxes with their open sides corresponding
to where the spines of the books would show and with
printed labels affixed to the opposite side (and sometimes the wider
sides). These books, though their bindings were protected by boxes,
also were generally supplied with jackets, commonly made of cloth
backed with stiff paper and printed only on the spines.[90] In some instances
the open (spine) side of the box was covered with a removable
lid, and the label was pasted on one end of the box, indicating that these


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boxes were intended to sit, in the bookshop or on the parlor table, so
that the books inside were resting on their fore-edges. When certain
one-volume works were given this treatment—especially thin books with
elaborate bindings, often containing a single heavily illustrated poem—
the lid usually fit over one of the wide sides of the box, exposing the
front cover of the book (or the front panel of the jacket) when removed.
If such boxes for one- and two-volume gift editions were a striking
phenomenon of the late nineteenth century,[91] the use of boxes with
printed labels or hinged lids for multi-volume sets went back at least to
mid-century: they were commonly used for series of children's books,
such as "Cousin Lucy's Stories" by Jacob Abbott (Auburn, N.Y.: Derby
& Miller, 1850), and for standard sets, such as The Handy-Volume
Shakespeare
in thirteen volumes (London: Bradbury, Evans; New York:
Wynkoop, 1867).

In the early years of the twentieth century there was little change in
publishers' practices in using jackets and boxes. That their function was
still largely to protect decorative bindings is suggested by a jingle printed
on the jacket of the 1913 Methuen edition of John Oxenham's Bees in
Amber:
"This outer wrap is only meant / To keep my coat from detriment.
/ Please take it off, and let me show / The better one I wear
below."[92] It was not always necessary to take the protective jacket off in
order to see the binding, or at least part of it, as my copy of Margaret
Turnbull's Looking after Sandy (Harper, 1914) shows: the jacket has an
oval hole in the front panel, revealing the picture that is pasted to the
front cover of the binding.[93] Despite the appearance, before this time, of
jackets with illustrations and blurbs printed on them, the idea that the
artistry and verbiage of jackets could be a marketing tool had not yet
become a dominant force in the production of jackets, though it was
certainly a growing one. And during the 1910s this situation changed
dramatically, so that by the 1920s many publishers thought of jackets
rather than bindings as the place for striking designs. Since jackets were
an established presence, it made sense to use their surfaces to the full


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and save money on the less visible bindings. From then on, the history
of book-jackets is primarily the story of shifting tastes in graphic design
and in advertising style, rather than of changes in form or function.

One formal development worth noting, however, is the occasional
addition of the wrap-around band or "flash," a narrow strip of paper
extending around the jacket, with ends either stuck together or folded
inside the book covers along with the jacket flaps. (An example is the one
on the American edition of Edward Dahlberg's The Flea of Sodom [New
Directions, 1950], which quotes from Herbert Read's introduction.) Such
bands were naturally meant to attract additional attention to the books
they adorned and often reported a late-breaking news item, such as the
award of a major prize to the book or its author. The result for collectors
and other students of publishing history was to create an additional
challenge, for bands are understandably more ephemeral than jackets,
and their survival rate is even lower.[94]

A similar challenge is locating the dust-jackets for paperback books.
The emergence of mass-market paperbacks in the 1930s was of course
one of the major events in Anglo-American publishing history in the
twentieth century, and by that time jackets were such an established part
of publishing that one should not be surprised by their use on some early
Albatross and Penguin paperbacks.[95] There were even more specific reasons,
however, for the jackets that appeared on Pocket Books and Bantam
titles in the 1940s: jackets with new illustrations were added to
resuscitate slow-selling titles, or to call attention to movies, or to indicate


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new publishers' takeover of existing stocks. The classic holy grail for
paperback collectors (like the Gatsby jacket for twentieth-century hardcover
collectors) is the Stanley Meltzoff jacket on some of the later printings
(beginning in 1945) of the Pocket Books edition of The Maltese
Falcon.
[96] (A related phenomenon is the use of jackets on wrapper-bound
proof copies: an example, reported by David L. Vander Meulen, is the
"Uncorrected Proof" of Frances Parkinson Keyes's The Gold Slippers
[Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958], in wrappers and with a jacket.)

If surviving examples of paperback jackets and nineteenth-century
hardcover jackets are scarce enough that it is feasible to list them, a different
means must be found for gaining bibliographical control over the
vast quantities of twentieth-century examples on hardcover books. We
can look to descriptive bibliographies of authors and presses and to
monographs on graphic artists for the recording of many significant
jackets, but the number dealt with in this way will always be a tiny
fraction of the total. The logical solution is for libraries to take note of
the presence of jackets in their cataloguing of books[97] and to make it
possible for such references to be located through searching in electronic
catalogues. Some special-collections libraries already do this, but others
do not.[98] In any case, the prior requirement is for libraries to preserve


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jackets in the first place—something that research libraries have generally
been loath to do, except for books that go into special collections
(though public libraries have often kept jackets, with a protective covering
around them, on circulating books). The situation is reflected in
Robert A. Tibbetts's comment, regarding the Charvat Collection of
pre-1901 American fiction at Ohio State University, that "most of the
dustjackets that once accompanied its books were lost to library processing
before the collection became an entity." Libraries' disregard for
jackets is epitomized by the response of a major research library when it
was offered the opportunity to purchase en bloc the great Leach collection
of American nineteenth-century jacketed books: it rejected the
offer on the grounds that a large portion of the books duplicated those
already in the collection, ignoring entirely the fact that none of the
jackets would have been duplicates. Barbara Ringer, when she was
Register of Copyrights in the U. S. Copyright Office, was so "appalled"
by the Library of Congress practice of throwing away the "vast majority"
of the jackets it received that she arranged to store them at her own
expense.[99]

Library practices vary, as A. S. A. Struik discovered in the mid-1990s
when he conducted a survey of eighteen Dutch libraries and thirteen
national libraries in other countries. His questionnaire asked, among
other things, whether the jackets of newly acquired books were saved
(and if so, how they were described and housed) and whether pre-1900
jackets had been inventoried or were ever purchased as such. The replies
were not encouraging. Although many of the libraries claimed to save
some of the jackets on newly acquired books, these affirmative responses
were often undercut by various qualifications, and only two libraries
(both Dutch) reported any effort to describe their jackets, even superficially.
And not a single library answered yes to the question whether it
intended to "collect or simply save" jackets in the future. As far as pre1900
jackets are concerned, only one library—the Museum Meermanno
Westreenianum in The Hague—indicated that it maintained an inventory
of such jackets, and only five (the British Library, the Library of
Congress, and three Dutch libraries) stated that they had ever bought a
book purely for the sake of its jacket.[100]

That so many libraries, including copyright-deposit libraries, are so


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unconcerned with jackets brings to mind the language (quoted earlier)
of Alan Smith, who calls it a "tragedy" that libraries have shirked their
"obligations" to scholars by engaging in the "vandalism" of destroying
jackets. This language is not too strong because book-jackets, as an important
class of primary documentation of publishing history, are unquestionably
part of what research libraries are pledged to preserve.
Other categories have been neglected in the past, such as publishers'
archives, but for a long time now the value of such records has been well
understood. It is shocking, therefore, that in the early twenty-first century,
with the field called "book history" flourishing, there should be so
relatively little thinking directed toward the preservation and cataloguing
of past and future book-jackets. The picture is not entirely bleak:
thanks to the understanding of collectors and dealers, which has become
widespread only in the past generation or so, special-collections departments
are now in possession of a great many jackets, which have arrived
largely as parts of collections but sometimes through the purchase of
single items. These jackets are likely to be noteworthy because of their
age or the fame of the books they cover, and their preservation seems
assured. What we need to be concerned about is the fate of all the other
jackets that survive and all that will appear on new books in the future.
Some large libraries have not destroyed all the jackets that came their
way; but those they have saved (often intermittently and inconsistently)
tend to be very difficult (or in some cases nearly impossible) to use because
of the way they have been stored and the lack of adequate (or any)
cataloguing.[101] Many jackets of the past are lost, but many others await
an act of reclamation.

The idea of a "Jacket Conservation Year," proposed by Alan Smith,
may be unrealistic; but there is reason to hope that we are entering a
period of consciousness-raising in regard to jackets, judging from the
conference on jackets that was sponsored by the Institute of English
Studies at the University of London on 19-20 September 2005,[102] along
with the news that a future series of Panizzi Lectures may deal with the
subject. Libraries must be encouraged to face (and be given assistance in


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dealing with) three long-neglected tasks. First is the proper housing of
all the jackets in their possession that are not in special-collections stacks,
as well as all that come with future acquisitions. Whether jackets are
kept on the books, with mylar around them, or filed separately will be
decided differently by different libraries; the important matter is that
they be carefully and systematically preserved. Second is the inclusion
of a reference to the presence of a jacket in catalogue entries for
books, so that a library's jacket holdings can be ascertained as readily as
its book holdings. Third is the requirement for taking jackets into
account in acquisition policies for noncurrent books.

Besides these basic necessities, the creation of a cooperative database
of digitized images of jackets is a great desideratum (despite the
problems that copyright may pose), so long as it does not lead anyone
to suppose that the originals can be disposed of—a response
that has all too often followed the microfilming or digitization of monographs
and serials. Reproductions of jackets, like reproductions of anything
else, can never replace originals.[103] And the need for the preservation
of multiple copies is just as crucial in the case of jackets as it is for
books, newspapers, and all other printed items, since jackets are just as
susceptible to variation among copies and since the value of widespread
access to originals is just as great. Whenever libraries in quantity begin
to regard the collecting and cataloguing of jackets as an accepted part of
their mission and start contributing to a union database of images, we
will be well on the way to rescuing what remains of a body of material
that enriches publishing history, and thus cultural and intellectual history
as well.

 
[73]

By "items" I mean entries in my list; some entries refer to more than one jacket (as
in the case of two-volume works or multi-volume sets).

[74]

One entry in my 1971 list has now been deleted, despite the attention it had received
prior to 1971: William W. Lord's Poems (New York: Appleton, 1845). What was supposedly
a jacket for this book was reported by T. O. Mabbott (Publishers' Weekly, 133 [16 April 1938],
1632) as being bound into a copy at the Huntington Library; it was then mentioned and
illustrated in Rosner's The Growth of the Book-Jacket (1954), p. xiv, and was also illustrated
in Publishers' Weekly, 159 (10 February 1951), 901, and in Kurt Weidemann's Book Jackets
and Record Covers: An International Survey
(1969), p. vi. But a copy of this book at the
Houghton Library shows that it was published in paper wrappers; and the two leaves of
printed decorated paper bound into the rebound copy at the Huntington and another one
at Harvard are most likely the front and back of the wrappers, not the front and back of a
jacket.

[75]

"The Annuals. Forget Me Not, for 1832. By F. Schoberl. Ackermann," Gentleman's
Magazine,
101 (October 1831), 340-342. This review is quoted by Eleanore Jamieson in "The
Binding Style of the Gift Books and Annuals," in the 1973 reprint of F. W. Faxon's Literary
Annuals and Gift Books
(1912), pp. 7-17 (see p. 8); it is also quoted by B. J. McMullin (in
the article cited in the text above at note 32), who corrects the page citation.

[76]

Victorian Publishers' Book-Bindings in Paper (1983), p. 10. Sheaths were used on
other books of this period as well—such as Hoyle's Games (1803), cited and illustrated by
McLean (p. 19)—and on children's games and peep-shows—such as The Swan of Elegance
(1814), in the Pierpont Morgan Library, and The Areaorama (1825), described in Judith St.
John, The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books (Toronto Public Library, 1958-75),
p. 1050.

[77]

The Bradley was described in Colophon Book Shop catalogue 10 (LaGrange, Ill.,
1978), item 106 ($85); the Herford is in my Kennerley collection.

[78]

The Gerar de Brahm example, in the Lilly Library, was discussed by Josiah Q.
Bennett in the December 1971 Serif (see note 31 above); the Darley was the first lot in the
1984 Leach sale (see part II above); the 1890 Greenaway (with a jacket as well as an envelope)
is in the collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin; the 1891 Greenaway was
offered in Wilder Books catalogue 9 (1984), item 51 ($675) and reoffered in catalogue 15
(1985), item Q ($275), where the envelope is described as a jacket with an enlarged back
flap that can be folded over the front.

[79]

Among the books and pamphlets with wallpaper jackets at the American Antiquarian
Society are James Janeway's A Token for Children (1821) and Amos Blanchard's Book of
Martyrs
(3rd ed., 1832); among the library's books with added jackets inscribed by early
owners is a copy of Daniel Adams's The Scholar's Arithmetic (1828), with a jacket inscribed
"Harry G. Taintor's book, Plainfield Academy, September 7, 1828." The paper-backed
leather jacket—with lettering on the spine—on a copy of the 1819 edition of Richard
Martyrs (3rd ed. 1832); among the library's books with added jackets inscribed by early
another example of a jacket supplied by an owner; but because it was possibly provided by
the author-publisher or his bookseller, I have included it provisionally in the appended list
of early publishers' jackets (where a further discussion can be found).

[80]

The Victoria and Albert Museum has examples of the Marcus Ward jackets on
books in the Alexander Dyce and John Forster collections, which came to the museum in
1869 and 1876, respectively. (I am grateful to Rowan Watson for this information.)
Michael Zinman has a copy of an advertisement for the Van Everen jackets, and Ellen
K. Morris and Edward S. Levin have an example of Size A. Zinman also has some later
examples of jackets for organizations, such as the Eclectic Reading Club jacket, dated 1893,
on a copy of Harper's for August 1893, and the "Texan Book Cover" ("Designed for Use in
the Public Schools of Texas"), found on a copy of Elementary Spanish Prose Book (Benjamin
H. Sanborn & Co., 1924). Many other commercially manufactured jackets for use on school
books were produced in the twentieth century.

[81]

As with the Newberry Library's remainder stock of Memorial Sketch of Dr. William
Frederick Poole
of 1895 (one of the private printings supervised by Stone & Kimball).

[82]

A few examples (out of many) are the following: J. David Williams (ed.), America
Illustrated
(Manhattan Printing and Publishing Co., 1877), listed in Bromer catalogue 37
(1985), item 2 ($125); Trollope, How the "Mastiffs" Went to Iceland (Virtue, 1878), cited by
Jim McCue (see note 50 above); Stevenson, Underwoods (Chatto & Windus, 1887), listed in
Wilder catalogue 9 (1984), item 123 ($950), and 15 (1985), item DI ($450); Twain, The
£1,000,000 Bank Note,
cited by Kevin Mac Donnell (see note 47 above); Housman, A
Shropshire Lad
(Kegan Paul, 1896), cited in Robert F. Metzdorf, The Tinker Library (1959),
entry 1243 ("original glazed paper jacket"); Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Smithers,
1898), listed in Black Sun Books 1976 catalogue (New York Miscellany), item 50 ($275);
Howells, Their Silver Wedding Journey (1899), listed in Trebizond Rare Books catalogue 6
(1977), item 63 ($60). (See also the 1984 Leach sale catalogue, lots 41, 77, 78, 79, 80 [plus
wrapping paper], 82, 101, 114, 115, 118, 129, 148 [through 1890].) An unprinted jacket over
wrappers is on Harriet P. James, Cruise of Yacht "Coronet" to Hawaiian Islands and Japan
(New York: William C. Martin, 1897), in the Amherst College Library (reported by John
Lancaster). Three examples of unprinted cloth jackets are on John Muir, Picturesque
California
(New York and San Francisco: Dewing, 1888), in Leach sale (1984), lot 110 ($575);
Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (Houghton Mifflin, 1890), in Leach sale, lot 146 (two two-volume
sets; $5); and Eugene Field, The House (Scribner, 1896), listed in Wilder Books
catalogue 15 (1985), item L ($225). Michael Zinman reported to me an unprinted sheath on
Elias Smith and Abner Jones, Hymns (Portsmouth: Smith, 1815), and a box (lacking its top,
which may have had a label) for the four volumes of Jacob Abbott's The William Gay Series
(Hurd & Houghton, 1869); and Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin have (among others)
an unprinted box for Sentiments and Similes of William Shakespeare (2nd ed., Longman,
1857). One glassine jacket (out of many) that is likely to be the publisher's is on Henryk
Sienkiewicz, In Vain (Little, Brown, 1899), in the Morris-Levin collection.

[83]

See the illustration of Das Taschenbuch for 1804 (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1803) in Anne
Renier's Friendship's Offering: An Essay on the Annuals and Gift Books of the 19th Century
(1964), plate 2 (facing p. 9).

[84]

The Parisian publishers Louis Janet and LeFuel were responsible for many annuals
in sheaths with printed labels on the sides. The collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward
S. Levin contains Janet examples from 1817 (Hommage aux dames), 1821 (Le luth français),
and 1828 (Annales romantiques) and LeFuel examples from 1819 (Le musée des théâtres),
1823 (Hommage aux demoiselles), and 1823 and 1832 (Almanach dédié aux dames), as well
as a Marcilly example from 1821 (Etrennes de polymnie); and I have an 1824 Janet example
(Lyre des demoiselles). (Morris and Levin in their book [see note 63 above] cite the 1828 Janet
[item 8] and two 1823 LeFuel items [9, 10].) In 1971 Charles Mann reported to me two
German annuals in Philip Shelley's collection that were published twenty-six years apart:
the Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1804 von Wieland und Goethe (published by Cotta of
Tübingen in 1803, with calendars on the sides of the sheath), and the Urania for 1830
(published by Bruckhaus of Leipzig in 1829, with a printed label on one of the narrow sides
of the sheath). Morris and Levin report that they have seen a Viennese example from 1826:
Aglaja: Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1827, published by Johann B. Wallishausser.

[85]

Such as La pastourelle (1819), Blanche Marguerite (1827), and Jean-Pierre Brès's
Voyage pittoresque et romantique sur la cheminée (1828), all Louis Janet publications in
sheaths; Contes de toutes les couleurs and Musée des dames et des demoiselles (each 6 vols.;
Marcilly, ca. 1825-30), in two-piece boxes with title labels on the top panels; and Réglement
concernant l'exercise et les manoeuvres de l'infanterie
(3 vols.; Levrault, 1831), in a box
printed on three sides. (The last example is in the Newberry Library; the others are in the
collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin—and the Musée is cited in their book
[see note 63 above], item 5.)

[86]

This statement is accurate even if the leather jacket on a copy of the 1819 edition
of Richard Phillips's The Universal Preceptor is a publisher's jacket (see note 79 above),
for it can scarcely be regarded as a modern-style jacket. The Quayle quotation is from The
Collector's Book of Books
(1971), pp. 114-115 (including an illustration of the front panel,
with its printed date). The Chamisso and Lessing jackets were reported by Thomas Warburton
in Bibliographical Notes & Queries, 1.4 (October 1935), 6; the Album is in the
collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin; the Gerritsz is listed in D. & E. Lake's
catalogue 84 (1987), item 108.

[87]

The earliest examples I have encountered of text or illustration on flaps are the
jackets for the Black edition of the Waverley Novels (London, 1885-87; Ferret Fantasy 1988
catalogue, item 123), Charles Hindley's The History of the Catnach Press (London: The
author, 1886; described by Peter C. G. Isaac in the 1975 Library article cited earlier), and
two books published by the Chicago firm Belford, Clarke: George Macdonald's Wilfrid
Cumbermede
(in the "Caxton Edition" series, 1888; Leach sale, lot 108), and Jane Porter's
Thaddeus of Warsaw (1889; Leach sale, lot 124).

[88]

Prices had earlier appeared on some of the mid-century wrappings (like those on
The Juvenile Scrap-Book for 1847-50).

[89]

The 1875 dividing line is of course approximate, and probably too conservative,
judging from the nature of the surviving examples of the preceding ten years; but the small
body of evidence makes further analysis difficult.

[90]

That the term for what we now call "jackets" was not yet established in the 1890s
is shown by an advertisement for a boxed series in Publishers' Weekly, 43 (28 January 1893),
207: "Illustrated Edition of Popular Poets" was said to be available in "cloth slip wrappers,
each book in a cloth box." As late as 1932 Henry McAnally, in "Book-Wrappers," Book
Collector's Quarterly,
6 (April 1932), 10-17, was speculating about what the object ought
to be called; he felt that it had "not yet attained to a settled name" but that "the catalogues
of the greater and more conscious booksellers" use "dust-wrapper" (p. 10).

[91]

They had not been unknown earlier, in undecorated form, as for Bibles and prayer
books.

[92]

Quoted by Michael Moon in a letter to the Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 13
(January 1986), 25.

[93]

Holes were frequently placed in the spines of jackets for series books, allowing the
same jacket to be used for all volumes, since the titles of the individual volumes showed
through the holes. Another, far less common, style of jacket that permits the binding to be
seen consists of clear plastic with printed paper flaps attached; two examples in my possession
are for Monk Gibbon's Seventeen Sonnets (London: Joiner & Steele, 1932) and
Christopher Hassall's Words by Request (London: Arthur Barker, 1952). (Bindings can of
course be seen through shrink-wrapping when books thus published do not have jackets;
for detachable printed material that may nevertheless be supplied, see note 94 below.)

[94]

The same can be said of the printed paper or card sometimes laid on the cover of
an unjacketed book so as to be visible thorugh shrink-wrapping, thus supplying the descriptive
text that would otherwise be on the jacket (an example is my Guide to the Study
of United States Imprints
[Harvard, 1971]).

[95]

Jackets over wrappers were not unknown earlier: a famous example is James Whitcomb
Riley's "The Old Swimmin' Hole" and 'Leven More Poems (Indianapolis: Hitt, 1883);
and an example from the following year is James B. Thayer's A Western Journey with Mr.
Emerson
(Little, Brown, 1884). (A copy of the Riley was in the 1990 Bradley Martin sale,
lot 2236; one of the Thayer was in the 1984 Leach sale, lot 64, and in the current stock of
Mac Donnell Rare Books.) But as a category they should be subdivided into two groups,
according to whether or not the wrappers are printed. Jackets over printed wrappers are
comparable to jackets on hardcover books; but jackets over unprinted wrappers constitute a
style of binding, in which the "jacket," though detachable, is an essential part of the binding,
not a covering for it. Both the Riley and the Thayer books in fact illustrate both types:
the binding of the Riley, for example, consists of a loose cream wrapper, printed like the
title-page, folded over an attached unprinted paper wrapper; over this double wrapper is a
brown-paper jacket with simpler printing. See Anthony J. and Dorothy R. Russo, A Bibliography
of James Whitcomb Riley
(1944), p. 3. Kevin Mac Donnell has reported to me some
nineteenth-century examples of detachable printed wrappers over unprinted card-stock
wrappers (the kind of detachable covering I do not consider a "jacket"): Oliver Bell Bunce's
Bachelor Bluff (Appleton, 1883); Don't: A Manual of Mistakes by "A Censor" (also Appleton,
1883); Thackeray's Complete Poems (White, Stokes & Allen, 1884); and Whittier's Saint
Gregory's Guest
(Houghton Mifflin, 1886).

[96]

Illustrated by Piet Schreuders in Paperbacks U.S.A.: A Graphic History, 1939-1959
(1981), p. 167 (on a 1947 printing), and cited by Richard Layman in Dashiell Hammett: A
Descriptive Bibliography
(1979), entry A3.3a (fourth printing, February 1945). Schreuders
also comments on paperback jackets on pp. 27, 52, 85-86, 115-116, and elsewhere. A list of
paperbacks with jackets (from five publishers) is offered by Peter Manesis in "Cover Up!",
Paperback Quarterly, 4.1 (Spring 1981), 26-30 (see pp. 28-29, including illustrations), supplemented
by letters from Bill Lyles and Bob Briney, 4.2 (Summer 1981), 52, and from
Daniel Gobbett, 4.3 (Fall 1981), 50 (mentioning additional publishers, including two British
ones, Hutchson and Guild Books). See also Bill Crider and Billy C. Lee, "Some Notes on
Movie Editions," Paperback Quarterly, 2.1 (Spring 1979), 29-36 (esp. p. 32); Thomas L.
Bonn, Under Cover: An Illustrated History of the American Mass Market Paperbacks (1982),
pp. 26-27, 99-100; Moe Wadle, The Movie Tie-In Book (1994); and Gary Lovisi, "Collecting
and Dealing in Paperback Books," AB Bookman's Weekly, 103 (11 January 1999), 57-60
(see p. 58).

[97]

That jackets might actually be useful in cataloguing is shown by Emma Stribling
Dendy in The Utility of Book Jackets in Subject Cataloging (Master's thesis, University of
North Carolina, 1956). Other library-school theses have dealt with the role of jackets in
book circulation: examples are Deborah K. Smith, Check-Out Rates of Books with Book
Jackets versus Books without Book Jackets
(University of Wyoming, 1989), and Marian F.
West, Putting on a Good Front: The Impact of Book Cover Design on Circulation (University
of Central Arkansas, 1992).

[98]

An example of a website reporting the jackets in a special collection is "Vietnam
War Literature Collection Dust Jackets," listing 245 jackets in the Special Collections Department
of the University of Delaware Library, available through the Library's website
(<http://www.lib.udel.edu>). The New York Public Library Digital Gallery site (<http://
digitalgallery.nypl.org>) includes "Dust Jackets from American and European Books,
1926-1947," containing over two thousand jackets that NYPL librarians saved from the
routine destruction to which most jackets were consigned by the Library.

[99]

Tibbetts's comment prefaces his list of nineteenth-century jackets in Serif, 10.2
(Summer 1973), 42. The offer of the Leach collection was reported by Kevin Mac Donnell
(the dealer who made the offer) on ExLibris (see note 72 above), 22 April 2005. Ringer's
concern for jackets was mentioned in Publishers' Weekly, 215 (20 February 1978), 29-30.

[100]

The detailed results of Struik's survey are reported in the Quaerendo article cited
in note 29 above. Among his observations is surprise that copyright-deposit libraries have
no regulations about the retention and description of jackets.

[101]

At the conference mentioned in the next paragraph, there were reports on the
history of the handling of jackets in four libraries, by Stephen Bury (British Library), Julie
Ann Lambert (Bodleian), David McKitterick (Cambridge University Library), and Rowan
Watson (Victoria & Albert). These talks dramatically showed how the practices have varied
over the years in each of these libraries and have resulted in posing obstacles for scholars.

[102]

Organized by Philip Errington and Warwick Gould, the conference was called
"Dust-Jackets: The Fate and State of Removable Dust-Jackets" and consisted of talks by
Brian Alderson, R. A. Gekoski, Alan Powers, Colin Smythe, and me, as well as the four
reports mentioned in the preceding note. A thorough account of this conference is
provided by Julian Rota in Antiquarian Booksellers' Association Newsletter, 333 (AugustSeptember
2005).

[103]

I have elaborated this point in many places, such as the three essays reprinted in
part II of my Literature and Artifacts (1998)—"Reproductions and Scholarship," "The
Latest Forms of Book-Burning," and "The Future of Primary Records"—and in "The
Librarians' Double-Cross," Raritan, 21.4 (Spring 2002), 245-263 (reviewing Nicholson Baker's
2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper).


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During the course of thirty-five years, my study of book-jackets has benefited
from the help of many individuals. To begin with, I want to record
profound gratitude to the late Richard Colles Johnson, who faithfully over
many years contributed significant pieces of information (as he did for so
many other projects of mine as well). And I am delighted to indicate the great
importance to me of the friendship and support of the late John Carter, the
pioneer student of book-jackets (as of many other aspects of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century books). I also am deeply appreciative of the thoughtful
care given to my work by David L. Vander Meulen, editor of Studies in
Bibliography,
and by his assistant, Elizabeth Lynch.

For their repeated contributions of details about early jackets, I wish to
express my gratitude to the following (some of whom are now deceased):
Jacob Blanck, Carey S. Bliss, Charles B. Gullans, Harrison Hayford, Peter B.
Howard, Herbert Kleist, John S. Van E. Kohn, Edward S. Levin, Kevin Mac
Donnell, Sandy Malcolm, Charles W. Mann, P. H. Muir, Michael Papantonio,
David A. Randall, Roger E. Stoddard, and Michael Zinman.

For generous assistance of many kinds to my book-jacket research, I also
wish to thank the following (some of whom are now deceased): Jeffrey Akard,
Brian Alderson, Jerome E. Anderson, Richard S. Barnes, George M. Barringer,
Terry Belanger, John Bidwell, William H. Bond, Richard Cady, William R.
Cagle, Peggy Christian, Philip Cohen, Joan St. C. Crane, Timothy d'Arch
Smith, Christian Y. Dupont, Douglas C. Ewing, Anthony Fair, Donald C.
Gallup, Mrs. C. M. Gee, William M. Gibson, Franklin Gilliam, Mark
Godburn, Frederick R. Goff, Thomas Goldwasser, Selwyn H. Goodacre,
George T. Goodspeed, Dan Gregory, Peter E. Hanff, Jack and Joyce Hanrahan,
Maxwell Hunley, Thomas J. Joyce, Priscilla Juvelis, Dean H. Keller,
Ken Leach, Barbara McCrimmon. Leslie McGrath, David McKitterick, A. L.
McLaughlin, David Magee, A. N. L. Munby, David L. O'Neal, J. Fernando
Peña, Anthony Rota, Robert Rulon-Miller, William H. Runge, Philip
Shelley, Victoria Steele, Mark Stirling, Lola L. Szladits, Terence Tanner,
Bruce Tober, Page Thomas, Michael Turner, David L. Vander Meulen,
Robert L. Volz, Alexander D. Wainwright, Rowan Watson, Burton Weiss,
Brooke Whiting, Michael Winship, David Yerkes, and Jake Zeitlin.

Finally, I am indebted to Philip Errington and Warwick Gould for inviting
me to read an abridged version of this essay at the opening of a conference
on "Dust-Jackets: The Fate and State of Removable Dust-Jackets,"
sponsored by the Institute of English Studies, University of London, on
19-20 September 2005.


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A LIST OF PRE-1891 EXAMPLES OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN
PUBLISHERS' PRINTED BOOK-JACKETS, SLIP-CASES, AND
OTHER DETACHABLE COVERINGS

THIS list does not attempt to be a census of all surviving examples; it is simply
a record of those that have come to my attention over a period of
more than thirty-five years. But because it is a sizable list (with nearly four
hundred entries), it provides a reasonable body of evidence for generalizing
about the history of publishers' detachable coverings through 1890. (A list
covering the next decade will be published later.) It also gives one a basis
for extrapolation: by noting which publishers are known to have used jackets
or slip-cases in particular years, one is in a better position to conjecture
whether any other book from the same period was likely to have had such a
covering at the time of its publication. (In the case of series, one can be nearly
certain that the other titles in a series, in addition to those listed here, had
jackets; but the list records only the specific titles known to have survived in
jackets.)

Entries are arranged chronologically, and within each year they are ordered
alphabetically by publisher (then author). The year of each entry is the
date of the copy cited, which may be later than the date of the first printing.
I have generally repeated the dates given in my sources without further investigation
(which would in any case probably be inconclusive without the
copies at hand); but when I have reason to suspect that the year assigned by
a source is based on a copyright-page date and that the book may possibly be
from a later printing, I have placed an asterisk after the citation. Copies that
have been assigned approximate dates are listed separately at the end. The
serial numbers assigned to the entries consist of the last two digits of the year,
followed—after a period—by consecutive numbers within the year. (For the
two eighteenth-century entries, all four digits of the year are used; and for
entries in the "Approximate Dates" section, an "X" replaces the year-digits.)

The amount of information in the entries varies considerably, depending
on what was available in my sources and notes. Each entry normally has four
parts (though the third is lacking in some instances). (1) Publisher and city
(usually excluding the names of any secondary publishers or cities mentioned
in imprints). (2) Author, title, and (if applicable) series or edition (with the
names of editors, illustrators, and translators selectively added). (3) A brief
description of the jacket and/or slip-case, indicating (when my information
allows) the color (if other than white, gray, tan, or cream), the surfaces containing
printed matter (with unusual features of the content mentioned),
and the color of the printing (when other than black). (4) Source(s), including
institutional libraries, private collections (with years signifying the latest
date when to my knowledge the books were in those collections), dealers'


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and auction-house catalogues, published articles and books, and private letters
or conversations; when the citations (in all these categories) are brief,
they are usually identified more fully in the index. Published illustrations
are referred to in the following entries: 03.1, 23.1, 24.3, 26.2, 27.2-3, 28.1-2,
29.1, 30.2, 32.1, 44.1, 46.1, 57.2, 60.3, 61.1, 65.1, 69.4, 70.2, 73.1, 76.3, 78.2,
78.6, 78.9, 82.8, 86.5, 86.13, 88.5, 89.24.

The following symbols are used to signal entries for detachable coverings
other than jackets of the now conventional type:

         
§  envelope or all-over wrapping 
¢  cloth jacket(s) 
†  sheath or box 
‡  box and paper jacket(s) 
†¢  box and cloth jacket(s) 

The index to the list is subdivided as follows: (1) Authors, editors, illustrators,
and translators (plus personal-name subjects, and titles without named
authors). (2) Publishers and series: British (London); British (other than
London); American (New York); American (other than New York). (3) Libraries.
(4) Collectors. (5) Dealers and auction houses. (6) Scholars (and other
persons who have provided information, not covered under previous headings,
in published or unpublished form).

1791

 
§ 1791.1.  Zachariah Poulson (Philadelphia). John William Gerar de Brahm,
Time: An Apparition of Eternity. Four-flapped envelope wrapping,
printed lengthwise on inside with a 115-word presentation
epistle dated 1791, to be signed by the author. [Lilly; discussed by
Josiah Q. Bennett in ". . . and other detachable coverings . . .,"
Serif, 8.4 (December 1971), 31-33.] 

1795

 
† 1795.1.  [OMITTED]

1801

 
† 01.1.  David Longworth (New York). The American Ladies & Gentlemens
Pocket Almanac and Belles Lettres Repository for 1802.
Five-sided
cardboard sheath, with label on sides. [Collection of G. T.
Tanselle, 2005.] 

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1803

 
† 03.1.  R. Baldwin (London). Edmond Hoyle, Hoyle's Games. Five-sided
cardboard sheath, printed on all sides. [Collection of John Porter;
cited and illustrated by McLean (1983), p. 19.] 

1810

     
† 10.1.  S. & J. Fuller (London). ["Dr. Walcot" (Amelia Troward?).] The
History and Adventures of Little Henry.
Printed cardboard sheath.
[Toronto Public Library (Osborne Collection); described by Judith
St. John (1958-75), p. 1052.] 
† 10.2.  S. & J. Fuller (London). ["Dr. Walcot" (Amelia Troward?).] The
History of Little Fanny.
Second Edition. Printed cardboard sheath.
[Toronto Public Library (Osborne Collection); described by Judith
St. John (1958-75), p. 1052.] 
† 10.3.  S. & J. Fuller (London). ["Dr. Walcot" (Amelia Troward?).] The
History of Little Fanny.
Fourth Edition. Printed cardboard sheath.
[Toronto Public Library (Osborne Collection); described by Judith
St. John (1958-75), p. 418]. 

1811

         
† 11.1.  S. & J. Fuller (London). Frank Feignwell's Attempts to Amuse His
Friends.
Printed cardboard sheath. [Toronto Public Library (Osborne
Collection); described by Judith St. John (1958-75), p. 418.] 
† 11.2.  S. & J. Fuller (London). ["Dr. Walcot" (Amelia Troward?).]
Phoebe, the Cottage Maid [1812 on title-page; 1811 on front cover
and sheath; back cover advertises a book to be published "early in
January 1812"]. Printed cardboard sheath. [Toronto Public Library
(Osborne Collection); described by Judith St. John (1958-75),
p. 1053.] 
† 11.3.  S. & J. Fuller (London). Young Albert, the Roscius. Printed cardboard
sheath. [Toronto Public Library (Osborne Collection); described
by Judith St. John (1958-75), p. 420, and by Brian Alderson
and Felix de Marez Oyens (2006), entry 211.] 
† 11.4.  S. & J. Fuller (London). Young Albert, the Roscius. Third Edition.
Printed cardboard sheath. [Collection of Brian Alderson, 2005.] 
† 11.5.  M. J. Godwin (London). Charles Lamb, Beauty and the Beast.
Printed brown cardboard sheath. [Houghton (Widener Collection).] 

1812

   
† 12.1.  S. & J. Fuller (London). ["Dr. Walcot" (Amelia Troward?).] Hubert,
the Cottage Youth.
Printed cardboard sheath. [Toronto Public
Library (Osborne Collection); described by Judith St. John (195875),
p. 1052.] 
† 12.2.  S. & J. Fuller (London). ["Dr. Walcot" (Amelia Troward?).] Lucinda,
the Orphan.
Printed cardboard sheath. [Toronto Public
Library (Osborne Collection); described by Judith St. John (195875),
p. 419.] 

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† 12.3.  I. & E. Wallis (London). St. Julien, the Emigrant. Printed cardboard
sheath. [Toronto Public Library (Osborne Collection); described
by Judith St. John (1958-75), p. 1053, and by Brian
Alderson and Felix de Marez Oyens (2006), entry 167.] 

1814

   
† 14.1.  S. & J. Fuller (London). ["Dr. Walcot" (Amelia Troward?).] Cinderella;
or, The Little Glass Slipper.
Printed cardboard sheath.
[Toronto Public Library (Osborne Collection); described by Judith
St. John (1958-75), p. 1051.] 
† 14.2.  John Harris (London). The Swan of Elegance: A New Game Designed
for the Instruction and Amusement of Youth.
Green
marbled paper-covered cardboard sheath, with engraved label.
[Morgan; described by Brian Alderson and Felix de Marez Oyens
(2006), entry 162.] 

1819[?]

 
¢ 19.1.  Richard Phillips (London; printed by William Lewis for Richard
Phillips, and sold by J. Souter and "all booksellers"). "David
Blair" [Richard Phillips], The Universal Preceptor. 10th ed., 1819.
Black limp roan jacket with black paper backing, stamped in blind
on front and back (a two-line border around the edges) and in gold
on spine (title). One's first thought about this jacket is that it was
made by an owner of the book, and it very well may have been. But
three pieces of evidence (furnished to me by Selwyn H. Goodacre,
the owner of the book in 1982) suggest at least the possibility that
the jacket was supplied by the author-publisher or by the bookseller
named in the imprint (or another bookseller) at the time of
original sale: (1) at the foot of the title-page, the price is stated as
"4s. 6d. bound"; (2) the front paste-down endpaper has an inscription
dated "October 13 1825"; (3) the binding has no lettering
whatever. Thus the binding dates from before 13 October 1825,
and in light of the title-page notation (indicating that copies were
sold bound) it may date from 1819; and perhaps the reason that the
binding has no lettering is that it was to be provided with a jacket
carrying a spine-title. This reasoning leads me to include the jacket
here with a question mark. [Collection of Selwyn H. Goodacre, 15
October 1982.] 

1822

 
† 22.1.  Ackermann (London). Forget Me Not . . . 1823. Four-sided(?) cardboard
sheath, repeating cover design. [Collection of Anne Renier;
cited by her (1964), p. 11. Cited by Jamieson (1973), p. 7.] 

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1823

 
† 23.1.  Lupton Relfe (London). Friendship's Offering . . . 1824. Five-sided
cardboard sheath, with printed label on front. [Pennsylvania State
University. State Library, Victoria; cited and illustrated by McMullin
(2000), pp. 260, 262 (noting that design on sheath is different
from that on binding). Cited by Jamieson (1973), p. 8 (noting that
design on sheath is the same as that on binding).] 

1824

     
† 24.1.  Ackermann (London). Forget Me Not . . . 1825. Four-sided cardboard
sheath, with green printed label on front and back. [Bodleian
(John Johnson Collection). Collection of Selwyn H. Goodacre,
1982.] 
† 24.2.  A. R. Poole (Philadelphia). Le souvenir, or Picturesque Pocket
Diary for 1825.
Cardboard sheath, with light green printed label on
front and back. [Collection of Philip Shelley, 1971.] 
† 24.3.  Lupton Relfe (London). Friendship's Offering . . . 1825. Five-sided
cardboard sheath, with printed label on front. [Massey College,
University of Toronto; cited and illustrated by McLean (1983), pp.
24-25.] 

1825

     
† 25.1.  Ackermann (London). Forget Me Not . . . 1826. Four-sided cardboard
sheath, with green printed label on front and back. [Bodleian
(John Johnson Collection).] 
† 25.2.  Marshall (London). The Pledge of Friendship . . . 1826. [Bodleian
(John Johnson Collection).] 
† 25.3.  A. R. Poole (Philadelphia). Le souvenir, or Picturesque Pocket
Diary for 1826.
(1) Cardboard sheath, with light green printed label
on sides. (2) Leather-covered sheath, with yellow printed label on
sides. [(1) Collection of Philip Shelley, 1971. Collection of Michael
Zinman, 1995. (2) Collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S.
Levin, 2005.] 

1826

 
† 26.1.  Ackermann (London). Forget Me Not . . . 1827. Four-sided cardboard
sheath, with green printed label on front and back. [Bodleian
(John Johnson Collection). Massey College, University of Toronto;
cited by McLean (1983), p. 25. Deval & Muir cat. 30 (1974),
item 313 (£6.50). Ken Leach cat. 86-5 (1986), item 55 ($85). Blackwell's
cat. B148 (2005), item 1 (£120). Collection of Ellen K. Morris
and Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 

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† 26.2.  Carey & Lea (Philadelphia). Atlantic Souvenir . . . 1827. Five-sided
cardboard sheath, with green printed label on front and
back. [Pennsylvania State University. Collection of Michael Zinman,
1995. Collection of Kevin Mac Donnell; illustrated by him
(2001), p. 30.] 
† 26.3.  Lupton Relfe (London). Friendship's Offering . . . 1827. Five-sided
cardboard sheath, with printed label on front. [Bodleian
(John Johnson Collection); cited by Jamieson (1973), pp. 7-8.] 

1827

         
† 27.1.  Ackermann (London). Forget Me Not . . . 1828. Four-sided(?) cardboard
sheath, repeating cover design. [Monash University; cited by
McMullin (2000), p. 258. Wilder cat. 61 (1993), p. 10 ($175).] 
† 27.2.  W. Baynes & Son, and Wightman & Cramp (London). The Amulet
. . . 1828.
Five-sided cardboard sheath, with printed purple labels on
all sides. [Massey College, University of Toronto; cited and illustrated
by McLean (1983), pp. 10, 24-25. In stock of Mac Donnell
Rare Books, prior to 2005.] 
† 27.3.  Carey, Lea & Carey (Philadelphia). Atlantic Souvenir . . . 1828.
Four-sided cardboard sheath, with green printed label on front and
back. [Library of Congress. Pennsylvania State University (3 copies).
Cited for both 1828 and 1829 by C. A. Wilson in Publishers' Weekly,
117 (15 February 1930), 894-895; and by Rosner (1954), p. xiv.
Mott cat. 199 (1978), item 135 ($150). Collection of Michael Zinman,
1995. Collection of Kevin Mac Donnell; illustrated by him
(2001), pp. 30, 46.] 
† 27.4.  N. S. Simpkins (Boston). The Moral and Religious Souvenir (1828).
Cardboard sheath, with green printed label on front and back.
[Collection of Michael Zinman, 1995.] 
† 27.5.  S. G. Goodrich (Boston). The Token . . . 1828. Five-sided cardboard
sheath, with green printed label on front and back. [Pennsylvania
State University (3 copies).] 

1828

   
† 28.1.  Ackermann (London). Forget Me Not . . . 1829. Four-sided cardboard
sheath, with green printed label on front and back. [Illustrated
by Renier (1964), facing p. 9. Collection of Philip Shelley,
1971. Collection of Michael Zinman, 1995. Collection of Kevin Mac
Donnell; illustrated by him (2001), p. 29. Collection of Ellen K.
Morris and Edward S. Levin, 2005. Collection of David L. Vander
Meulen, 2005.] 
† 28.2.  Carey, Lea & Carey (Philadelphia). Atlantic Souvenir . . . 1829.
Four-sided cardboard sheath, with green printed label on front and
back. (See 1827.) [Library of Congress. Pennsylvania State University.
Cited for both 1828 and 1829 by C. A. Wilson in Publishers'
Weekly, 117 (15 February 1930), 894-895; and by Rosner, p. xiv.
Hurley Books cat. 75 (1978), item 6 ($45), item 7 (five-sided, $75).
Leach cat. 94-1 (1994), item 12 ($500). Collection of Michael Zinman,
1995. Collection of Kevin Mac Donnell; illustrated by him
(2001), pp. 29, 30.] 

101

Page 101
   
† 28.3.  I. Poole (London). First Flowers, or Literary Bouquet . . . 1829.
Sheath with printed label. [In stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books,
2005.] 
† 28.4.  Westley & Davis (London). The Amulet . . . 1829. Five-sided
cardboard sheath, with printed label on front and back. [Bodleian
(John Johnson Collection). Collection of Ellen K. Morris and
Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 

1829

 
† 29.1.  Ackermann (London). Forget Me Not . . . 1830. Five-sided cardboard
sheath, with green printed label on front and back. [Georgetown
University. Massey College, University of Toronto; cited and
illustrated by McLean (1983), pp. 24-25. Collection of Philip
Shelley, 1971. Collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin,
2005; cited by them in The Art of Publishers' Bookbindings 18151915
(2000), entry 6 (p. 20).] 

1830

     
† 30.1.  Ackermann (London). Forget Me Not . . . 1831. Four-sided cardboard
sheath, with green printed label on front and back. [Bodleian
(John Johnson Collection). Collection of Ellen K. Morris and
Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 
† 30.2.  S. & J. Fuller (London). ["Dr. Walcot" (Amelia Troward?).] The
History of Little Fanny.
10th edition. Five-sided sheath, repeating
design of binding (wrappers). [Illustrated by Alan Powers in
Children's Book Covers: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design
(2003), p. 15. Collection of Brian Alderson, 2005 (whose copy
provides the evidence for the attribution to "Dr. Walcot" here and
in 10.1-3, 11.2, 12.1-2, and 14.1 above).] 
† 30.3.  [OMITTED]

1832

 
§ 32.1.  Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman (London). The
Keepsake . . . 1833.
Printed on front and back; designed to enclose
the book completely, like wrapping paper. [Collection of John
Carter, 1952; reported by him in Publishers' Weekly, 126 (22 September
1934), 1121, and in Bibliographical Notes & Queries, 1.2
(April 1935), 1. Cited and illustrated by Rosner (1954), p. vii; illustrated
by Kurt Weidemann in Book Jackets and Record Covers:
An International Survey
(1969), p. v, and by Tanselle (1971), plate
1. This covering was lost in 1952 on the way to the Bodleian, as
Carter reports in Books and Book-Collectors (1956), p. 182.] 

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1844

 
§ 44.1.  Fisher, Son & Co. (London). [Sarah Stickney Ellis], The Juvenile
Scrap-Book . . . 1845.
Printed on front; designed to enclose the book
completely, like wrapping paper. [UCLA; illustrated by Tanselle
(1971), plate 2.] 

1846

 
§ 46.1.  Fisher, Son & Co. (London). [Sarah Stickney Ellis], The Juvenile
Scrap-Book . . . 1847.
Printed on front (including price and revealing
author's name); designed to enclose the book completely, like
wrapping paper. [UCLA; illustrated by Tanselle (1971), plate 3.
Collection of B. S. Long, 1935; cited by I. A. Williams in Bibliographical
Notes & Queries,
1.2 (April 1935), 1-2. In stock of Beauchamp
Bookshop, 1952.] 

1847

 
§ 47.1.  Fisher, Son & Co. (London). [Sarah Stickney Ellis], The Juvenile
Scrap-Book . . . 1848.
Designed to enclose the book completely, like
wrapping paper. [Collection of B. S. Long, 1935; cited by I. A. Williams
in Bibliographical Notes & Queries, 1.2 (April 1935), 1-2. In
stock of Beauchamp Bookshop, 1952.] 

1848

   
§ 48.1.  American Art Union (New York). F. O. C. Darley, Six Illustrations
of Rip Van Winkle.
Envelope slip-case printed on front with design
and text different from book and stating "India Proof Copy"
in upper left corner. [Leach sale (1984), lot 1 ($600).] 
§ 48.2.  Peter Jackson. (London). [Sarah Stickney Ellis], The Juvenile
Scrap-Book . . . 1849.
Designed to enclose the book completely, like
wrapping paper. [Collection of B. S. Long, 1935; cited by I. A. Williams
in Bibliographical Notes & Queries, 1.2 (April 1935), 1-2.] 

1849

   
† 49.1.  G. E. Eyre and W. Spottiswoode (London). The Book of Common
Prayer.
Maroon hinged box, with lettering on spine. [Collection of
Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 
§ 49.2.  Peter Jackson (London). [Sarah Stickney Ellis], The Juvenile
Scrap-Book . . . 1850.
Designed to enclose the book completely.
[Collection of B. S. Long, 1935; cited by I. A. Williams in Bibliographical
Notes & Queries,
1.2 (April 1935), 1-2.] 

103

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1850

 
† 50.1.  Derby & Miller (Auburn, N.Y.). Jacob Abbott, "Cousin Lucy's
Stories," 6 vols. Box with label. [Collection of Michael Zinman,
1995.] 

1853

 
† 53.1.  American Sunday-School Union (Philadelphia). Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps, "Kitty Brown Series." 4 vols., 1851-53. Box, with colored
pictorial label. [Leach sale (1984), lot 2 ($110).] 

1857

   
57.1.  Blackie (London). Charles MacFarlane and Thomas Thomson,
The Comprehensive History of England. Printing includes price.
4 vols. [Reported to me by John Carter, 1968.] 
§ 57.2.  Whittaker (London). Richard S. Gedney, The Poetical Works,
ed. James Ogden. 2nd ed. Printed on front (with three imprints,
the first of which is Appleton, New York—but the sheets of the
book, and presumably the jacket, were printed in England; the
third imprint is Galt, Manchester); designed to enclose the book
completely, like wrapping paper. [Bodleian (John Johnson Collection).
Lilly. Southern Methodist University. Cited by David Magee
in Publishers' Weekly, 133 (15 January 1938), 245 (illustrated).
Charles Yale cat. 13 (October 1941), item 176 (labeled "The First
American Dust-Jacket"). Cited by L. D. Feldman in Publishers'
Weekly,
152 (6 September 1947), B154; by Rosner, p. xiv (illustrated);
and in Report of the Rare Book Librarian, The Lilly Library,
Indiana University, July 1, 1963-June 30, 1965,
p. 23. Illustrated
by John T. Winterich and David A. Randall in A Primer of
Book Collecting
(3rd rev. ed., 1966), p. 119; and by Tanselle (1971),
plate 4.] 

1859

   
† 59.1.  Brown, Taggard & Chase (Boston). George Coolidge, The Baby
Dear.
"My Own Little Library" (No. 1). Blue box, printed in gold.
[Collection of Michael Zinman, 1995.] 
† 59.2.  Brown, Taggard & Chase (Boston). George Coolidge, "My Own
Little Library." 6 vols. Box, printed in gold. [Leach sale (1984),
lot 3 ($40; lacks one booklet).] 

1860

 
60.1.  Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts (London). John Bunyan,
Pilgrim's Progress, ill. Charles Bennett. Printed in red on front
(including illustration from the book, price, and date) and spine.
[Collection of Thomas Balston, 1931; cited by John Carter in Publishers'
Weekly,
120 (15 August 1931), 617, and in Publisher & Bookseller,
19 August 1932, pp. 293-294, and by Rosner (1954), p. vii.
Scribner Book Store cat. 110 (1936), item 17 ("An amazing copy,"
the jacket being "one of the earliest recorded"; $35).] 

104

Page 104
   
§ 60.2.  Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts (London). Edward Falkener,
Daedalus. Designed to enclose the book completely, like
wrapping paper. [Cited by McMullin (2000), p. 264 (quoting Peter
Baring's 1999 description of an auction of "about 8" copies in
wrapping).] 
§ 60.3.  Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts (London). Edward Falkener
(ed.), The Museum of Classical Antiquities. Printed on front;
designed to enclose the book completely, like wrapping paper.
[Monash University; discussed and illustrated by McMullin
(2000), pp. 263-265 (mentioning another copy in Melbourne and
quoting Peter Baring's 1999 description of an auction of "about
20" such copies).] 

1861

 
61.1.  Blackwood (Edinburgh). [Noel Paton], Poems by a Painter. Printed
on front and spine. [Houghton; illustrated by Tanselle (1971),
plate 5.] 

1862

   
62.1.  Blackie (London). Henry Beveridge, A Comprehensive History of
India.
3 vols. (comprising nine parts, 1858-62). Printing includes
price. [Reported to me by John Carter, 1968.] 
62.2.  Groombridge & Sons (London). Jonathan Couch, The History of
the Fishes of the British Islands.
4 vols. 1862-65. Green, printed on
sides (design of cover) and spine (title, author, decoration). [Yale
Center for British Art (lacking jacket for vol. 2 [1863]); displayed in
exhibition "Gold on Cloth," October 1992.] 

1864

 
64.1.  Groombridge & Sons (London). Jonathan Couch, The History of
the Fishes of the British Islands.
4 vols., 1862-65. Green, printed on
sides (design of cover) and spine (title, author, decoration). [Yale
Center for British Art (lacking jacket for vol. 2 [1863]); displayed
in exhibition "Gold on Cloth," October 1992.] 

1865

   
65.1.  Appleton (New York). The Bryant Festival at "The Century."
Printed on front and back with binding design. [Cited by John S.
Van E. Kohn in Publishers' Weekly, 132 (30 October 1937), 173235;
and by Rosner, p. xv (illustrated).] 
65.2.  Groombridge & Sons (London). Jonathan Couch, The History of
the Fishes of the British Islands.
4 vols., 1862-65. Green, printed on
sides (design of cover) and spine (title, author, decoration). [Yale
Center for British Art (lacking jacket for vol. 2 [1863]); displayed
in exhibition "Gold on Cloth," October 1992.] 

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1867

     
† 67.1.  Bradbury, Evans & Co. (London). The Handy-Volume Shakespeare.
13 vols. Green hinged box with lettering on top and label
inside lid. [Colleciton of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin,
2005.] 
67.2.  Edward Moxon (London). Alfred Tennyson, Guinevere, ill. Gustave
Doré. [Cited by Eric Quayle in "The Evolution of Trade
Bindings, Part 2," Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 4 (September
1977), 358-364 (see p. 361). Quayle says that "All of Edward
Moxon's series of folio reprints of the poets" were published in
jackets, and he mentions Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1868) and
Enid (1868), Thomas Hood's Poems (1870), and Keats's Endymion
(1873); but it is not clear whether he has seen surviving examples
of all of them, and entries for them are not included here.] 
† 67.3.  Henry M. Wynkoop (New York). The Handy-Volume Shakespeare.
13 vols. Box with label on lid. [Collection of Michael Zinman,
1995.] 

1868

   
68.1.  George A. Leavitt (New York). The Magnolia . . . 1869. Yellow,
printed on front, spine, and back (ad for "Choice and Elegant Gift
Books"). [Chapin.] 
† 68.2.  Sheldon & Co. (New York). Mrs. Sanborn Tenney, "Pictures and
Stories of Animals for the Little Ones at Home." 6 vols. Box with
orange pictorial label. [Leach sale (1984), lot 5 ($110).] 

1869

       
§ 69.1.  Catholic Publication Society (New York). Aubrey De Vere, Irish
Odes and Other Poems.
Printed on spine; designed to enclose the
book completely. [Cited by M. J. Macmanus in Bibliographical
Notes & Queries,
1.2 (April 1935), 2.] 
69.2.  Sampson Low (London and New York). Robert Buchanan, Ballad
Stories of the Affections, from the Scandinavian.
[Cited by Goodspeed's
Book Shop in Publishers' Weekly, 119 (16 May 1931), 2443;
and by Rosner (1954), p. xv.] 
69.3.  Macmillan (London). Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days.
Illustrated ed. Printed on front and spine. [Princeton (Robert H.
Taylor Collection).] 
69.4.  Putnam (New York). William Dean Howells, No Love Lost: A
Romance of Travel.
Printed on front (including price and subtitle
"A Story of Venice"). [Doheny sale (1988), lot 1405 (illustrated on
p. 227), sold to Robert Rulon-Miller for $1870; Rulon-Miller cat.
88 (1988), item 151 ($3500), labeled "Third Earliest American
Dust-Jacket Extant," and cat. 92 (1990), item 108 ($3500), labeled
"The earliest obtainable American dust-jacket." Parkhurst cat. 1
(1996), item 69 ($8500), labeled "Earliest dust jacket known in a
private collection." In stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, prior to
2005.] 

106

Page 106

1870

     
70.1.  Blackie (London). F.-A. Pouchet, The Universe. Printed in red
and brown (including price). [Reported to me by John Carter,
1968.] 
70.2.  Chapman & Hall (London). Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin
Drood.
Printed on front and spine. [Collection of A. Edward
Newton (d. 1940). Cited by Raphael King in Publishers' Weekly,
117 (19 April 1930), 2148; by John Carter in Publisher & Bookseller,
19 August 1932, pp. 293-294; by Edgar H. Wells in Publishers'
Weekly,
117 (21 June 1930), 3040; by John C. Eckel in The First
Editions of the Writings of Charles Dickens
(2nd ed., 1932), p. 98
("the earliest known dust-wrapper") and reproduced as the frontispiece;
by A. Edward Newton in Bibliographical Notes & Queries,
1.2 (April 1935), 2; in Publishers' Weekly, 159 (10 February 1951),
899; by Rosner (1954), p. vii; and by Walter E. Smith, Charles
Dickens in the Original Cloth
(1982), p. 116, n. 1.] 
† 70.3.  Lee & Shepard (Boston). Sophie May, "Dotty Dimple Series." 6
vols. Box with colored pictorial label. [Leach sale (1984), lot 6
($100)*.] 

1871

 
† 71.1.  James R. Osgood (Boston). Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Works. 10 vols.
Dark green pebble-grained cloth box with hinged top, lettered on
top "TENNYSON'S WORKS." [Collection of Penelope C. and George M.
Barringer, 1980.] 

1872

 
72.1.  Longmans, Green (London). Andrew Lang, Ballads and Lyrics of
Old France.
[Houghton; cited in The Houghton Library, Reports
XXX-XXXIV: Acquisitions 1970-1975
(1979), p. 214.] 

1873

 
73.1.  Reeves & Turner (London). The Old Book Collector's Miscellany;
or, A Collection of Readable Reprints of Literary Rarities.
Vol. 3.
Printed on front (including date), spine, and back (front and back
contain a listing of the contents); printed on the reverse of the 1878
Reeves & Turner jacket listed below. [Collection of Peter C. G.
Isaac, 1975; discussed by him (1975), pp. 51-52 (illustrated).] 

107

Page 107

1874

   
74.1.  Charles Griffin & Co. (London). Edgar Allan Poe, The Poetical
Works,
ed. James Hannay. "The Emerald Series of Poets," Printed
on front (including "Fourteenth Thousand"), spine, and back (ad
for series). [Collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin,
2005.] 
74.2.  Macmillan (London). Christina Rossetti, Speaking Likenesses.
Printed on front and spine. [Kent State; cited by Keller (1971), p.
33. Deighton, Bell cat. 130 (ca. 1972), item 569 (£38). In stock of
James Cummins, 1980s(?) ($5000).] 

1875

         
75.1.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The
Hanging of the Crane.
Printed on front. [Cited by C. A. Wilson in
Publishers' Weekly, 117 (18 January and 15 February 1930), 351352,
894-895; and by Rosner (1954), p. xv.] 
† 75.2.  Hurd & Houghton (New York). Dr. William Smith's Dictionary
of the Bible,
ed. H. B. Hackett and Ezra Abbot. 4 vols. Box with
printed label. [Collection of Michael Zinman, 1995.] 
75.3.  Scribner, Armstrong (New York). Charles Greville, The Greville
Memoirs.
"Bric-a-Brac Series." Printed in red on front (including
date) and back (ad for the series). [Leach sale (1984), lot 7 ($30 for
three vols. of series).] 
75.4.  Scribner, Armstrong (New York). Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt,
et al., Personal Recollections. "Bric-a-Brac Series." Printed in red
on front (including date) and back (ad for the series). [Leach sale
(1984), lot 7 ($30 for three vols. of series).] 
75.5.  Scribner, Armstrong (New York). John O'Keeffe, Michael Kelly,
John Taylor, and Richard Henry Stoddard, Personal Reminiscences.
"Bric-a-Brac Series." Printed in red on front (including
date) and back (ad for the series). [Leach sale (1984), lot 7 ($30 for
three vols. of series).] 

1876

   
76.1.  Edward Bosqui (San Francisco). Charles B. Turrill, California
Notes: First Volume.
Printed on front. [Leach sale (1984), lot 8
($110).] 
76.2.  Lee & Shepard (Boston). Sarah Flower Adams, "Nearer, My God,
to Thee.
" Printed in red on front (repeating title page, including
date). [American Antiquarian Society. Collection of Jacob Blanck,
1970. In stock of The Bookmark, August 1993 ($350). Reported to
me by Kevin Mac Donnell, 2005.] 

108

Page 108
 
76.3.  Macmillan (London). Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark.
Printed on front, spine, and back. [Cited by Raphael King in Publishers'
Weekly,
117 (19 April 1930), 2148; by John Carter in Publishers'
Weekly,
117 (19 April 1930), 2148, and in Publisher &
Bookseller,
19 August 1932, pp. 293-294; and by F. B. A. [Frederick
B. Adams] in Bibliographical Notes & Queries, 1.2 (April 1935), 2;
in Publishers' Weekly, 159 (10 February 1951), 899; and by Rosner
(1954), p. vii (illustrated). Collection of Douglas C. Ewing, 1968;
illustrated by Tanselle (1971), plate 6. Swann auction cat. 992 (5
June 1975), lot 64. In stock of Bertram Rota, 6 June 1975. Cited by
Selwyn H. Goodacre in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark,
ed. Martin Gardner (1982).] 

1877

               
77.1.  Appleton (New York). Philadelphia International Exhibition of
1876, Gems of the Centennial Exhibition. Printed on front and
spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 12 ($45).] 
77.2.  Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger (Philadelphia). A. J. Pleasonton,
The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight. Printed on
front. [Collection of Michael Zinman, 1995.] 
77.3.  William F. Gill (Boston). Poems of the "Old South." Printed on
front. [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
† 77.4.  Harper (New York). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,
ill. Gustave Doré. Box, with printing on top.
[Leach sale (1984), lot 9 ($400).] 
77.5.  Lee & Shepard (Boston). William Knox, Oh, Why Should the Spirit
of Mortal Be Proud?
(1) Printed on front (repeating title-page, including
date). (2) Printed on front and back (ad; later printing?).
[ (1) Collection of Jacob Blanck, 1970. Leach sale (1984), lot 10 (not
sold). (2) Leach sale (1984), lot 11 ($20). In stock of Mac Donnell
Rare Books, 2005.] 
77.6.  Lee & Shepard (Boston) and Charles T. Dillingham (New York).
Henry Francis Lyte, Abide with Me. Printed on front and back
(ad). [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005. In stock of Mac Donnell
Rare Books, 2005.] 
77.7.  Lothrop (Boston). Elizabeth C. Clephane, The Ninety and Nine.
Printed on front. [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
77.8.  Frederick Warne (London). Walter Crane, The Baby's Opera.
[Heritage Book Shop cat. 141 (1981), item 17 ($100).] 

1878

 
78.1.  Bell (London). Benjamin Maund, The Botanic Garden, ed. James
C. Niven. 6 vols. Light blue, with elaborate decoration (volume
numbers on spines added with hand-stamp). [Reported to me by
John Carter, 1968.] 

109

Page 109
                 
78.2.  Bradbury, Agnew (London). Kate Field (ed.), New York Bell's
Telephone.
[Illustrated by Eric Quayle in "The Art in Binding,"
Wilson Library Bulletin, 51 (1977), 408-418 (see p. 416).] 
¢ 78.3.  David Douglas (Edinburgh). William Stirling-Maxwell, Antwerp
Delivered in MDLXXVII.
Cloth, with three flaps at front and back;
printed on front, spine, and back. [Bodleian (John Carter Collection).]  
† 78.4.  Harper (New York). John Townsend Trowbridge, The Book of
Gold and Other Poems.
Box with label on front. [Leach sale (1984),
lot 17 ($25).] 
78.5.  Lee & Shepard (Boston) and Charles T. Dillingham (New York).
Henry Francis Lyte, Abide with Me. Printed on front (repeating
title-page). [Leach sale (1984), lot 16 (not sold).] 
78.6.  Macmillan (London). Henry James, French Poets and Novelists.
Printed on front and spine. [Gilvarry sale (1986), lot 90 (illustrated
$3800). Seen at Gekoski booth, New York Antiquarian Book Fair,
16 April 1998 ($15,000).] 
78.7.  Porter & Coates (Philadelphia). "Harry Castelmon" [Charles
Austin Fosdick], The Boy Trapper. Ad on back for "Best Editions
of Popular 12mos." [Leach sale (1984), lot 15 ($55).] 
78.8.  Putnam (New York). William Cullen Bryant, The Flood of Years,
ill. W. J. Linton. Printed in red on front and back (list of "Holiday
Publications 1877-1878"). [Goodspeed cat. 580, item 10 ($100).
Leach sale (1984), lot 14 ($30).] 
78.9.  Reeves & Turner (London). Charles Hindley, The Life and Times
of James Catnach (Late of Seven Dials), Ballad Monger.
Printed on
front (advertisement for the book, dated), spine (same as label on
book spine), and back (reproducing part of one of Catnach's broadsides);
printed on the reverse of the 1873 Reeves & Turner jacket
listed above. [Collection of Peter C. G. Isaac, 1975; discussed by
him (1975), pp. 51-52 (with illustration, and pointing out that the
"bibliographical information on the jacket is consistent neither
with itself nor with that given on the copy" of the book).] 
78.10.  Virtue (London). Anthony Trollope, How the "Mastiffs" Went to
Iceland.
Light blue, printed on front (repeating title-page). [Burmester
cat. 40 (1999), item 113 (£2500); cited by McMullin (2000),
p. 266.] 

1879

 
79.1.  J. Fairbanks (Chicago). Loomis T. Palmer, General U. S. Grant's
Tour around the World.
Printed on front (three engravings) and
back (advertisement for works by T. DeWitt Talmadge). [Kane
auction cat. 55 (6 April 1997), lot 206.] 

110

Page 110
           
¢ 79.2.  Houghton, Osgood (Boston). Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Story of
a Cat.
Red cloth, printed in gold on spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot
18 ($30).] 
79.3.  Houghton, Osgood (Boston). Mother Goose's Melodies, ill. Alfred
Kappes. Pictorial jacket printed in brown. [Leach sale (1984), lot
19 ($160).] 
79.4.  Lee & Shepard (Boston) and Charles T. Dillingham (New York).
Augustus Montagu Toplady, Rock of Ages. (1) Printed on front.
(2) Printed on front and back (ad for "Illustrated Hymns and
Poems"; later printing?). [(1) Leach sale (1984), lot 20 ($5). (2) In
stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, 2005.] 
79.5.  Old South Fair Committee (Boston). Poems of the "Old South."
Limited, signed issue. [In stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, prior
to 2005.] 
79.6.  Routledge (London). Kate Greenaway, Under the Window.
Printed on front (with illustration from p. 57), spine, and back
(with advertisement for holiday books for 1879-80). [Collection of
P. H. Muir, 1971; Muir, in a review in the Book Collector, 27
(1978), 126, uses the jacket advertisement to date the book.] 
‡ 79.7.  Trübner (London). P. F. Krell et al., The Classics of Painting.
Drop-front box, with design and lettering on front; jacket has
same design on front. [Collection of P. H. Muir, 1971.] 

1880

         
80.1.  Belford, Clarke (Toronto [and Chicago]). Mary Russell Mitford,
Our Village. Printed on front (including blurbs, ads, and the Chicago
and Toronto imprint). [Leach sale (1984), lot 26 ($35).] 
80.2.  Dodd, Mead (New York). Rosina Emmet, The Pretty-Peggy Painting
Book.
Printed on front. [Leach cat. 71-2 (1971), item 112 ($35);
Leach sale (1984), lot 24 ($55).] 
† 80.3.  Harper (New York). Jacob Abbott, Franconia Stories. Box with
label on front. [Leach sale (1984), lot 21 ($10)*.] 
80.4.  Lee & Shepard (Boston). Sarah Flower Adams, "Nearer, My God,
to Thee.
" Printed in red on front (repeating title page, except that
it retains the original date, 1876, and is thus the same jacket as that
listed above under 1876). [Leach sale (1984), lot 22 (not sold).] 
80.5.  Whittet & Shepperson (Richmond). George D. Fisher, History and
Reminiscence of the Monumental Church, Richmond, Virginia.

Printed on spine [Leach sale (1984), lot 25 (with three copies of the
jacket; $25).] 

1881

 
81.1.  Appleton (New York). Arabella B. Buckley, The Fairy-Land of
Science.
Printed on front and spine (repeating cover). [Leach sale
(1984), lot 27 ($12.50).] 

111

Page 111
                           
81.2.  Appleton (New York). Arabella B. Buckley, Life and Her Children.
Printed on front and spine (repeating cover). [Leach sale (1984), lot
28 (not sold).] 
81.3.  Appleton (New York). Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus. Printed
on front and back, with F. S. Church illustration from p. 90 and
excerpt from review. [Cited by Dauber & Pine in Publishers' Weekly,
117 (15 February 1930), 894-895; and by Rosner (1954), p. xv.] 
81.4.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion. Printed
on front (including date and "Key to the Characters in Endymion"),
spine, and back (ad with six-paragraph comment on J. W. Gally's
Sand and Big Jack Small). [Leach sale (1984), lot 30 ($25). Wilder
cat. 15 (1985), item H ($450); list 87-A (1987), item 17 ($275).] 
81.5.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). G. J. Holyoake, Among the Americans
and A Stranger in America.
[Palinurus cat. 7 (1980), item 209
($250).] 
81.6.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Charles Carleton Coffin, The Boys of '61.
Printed on spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 29 ($10)*.] 
81.7.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Song of the
Brook,
ill. A. F. Bellows et al. Front repeats title-page. [Leach sale
(1984), lot 39 ($5).] 
81.8.  Fergus Printing Co. (Chicago). Henry Hurlbut, Chicago Antiquities.
Printed on spine. [Seen in Titcomb's Book Shop booth at
Washington Book Fair, 8 March 1979 ($75). Wilder cat. 15 (1985),
item T ($235).] 
81.9.  Fergus Printing Co. (Chicago). Henry Tanner, The Martyrdom of
Lovejoy.
Printed on spine. [Reported to me by Terence Tanner,
18 October 1972.] 
81.10.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Charlotte Fiske Bates (ed.), The
Longfellow Birthday-Book.
"Birthday Books." Printed in dark blue
on front and spine (repeating cover) and back (ad for series). [Collection
of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 
81.11.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Almira L. Hayward (ed.), The Illustrated
Birthday Book of American Authors.
"Birthday Books." 2nd
ed. Printed on front and spine (repeating cover, including designer's
monogram "FP") and back (ad for series). [Reported to me by
Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 
81.12.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). [Horace E. Scudder], Mr. Bodley
Abroad.
Pictorial, with ad on back. [Leach sale (1984), lot 36 ($35.)] 
81.13.  Lee & Shepard (Boston). John Howard Payne, Home Sweet Home.
Printed on front (repeating title-page). [Collection of Herbert
Kleist, 1970. Leach sale (1984), lot 33 (not sold). Reported to me
by Kevin Mac Donnell, 2005.] 
81.14.  Lippincott (Philadelphia). Thomas Buchanan Read, Brushwood.
Printed on front and spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 34 ($5)*.] 
81.15.  Lippincott (Philadelphia). Thomas Buchanan Read, Drifting.
Printed in red and black on front and spine (repeating cover) and
back (ad). [Leach sale (1984), lot 35 ($35).] 

112

Page 112
           
81.16.  Lothrop (Boston). Martha Perry Lowe, The Story of Chief Joseph.
Printed on front (repeating title-page). [Leach sale (1984), lot 32
($25).] 
81.17.  Lothrop (Boston). Samuel Woodworth, The Old Oaken Bucket.
(1) Printed on front (repeating cover). (2) Orange, printed on front
(repeating title-page). [(1) In stock of Serendipity Books, November
1977. Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005. (2) Leach sale (1984), lot
40 ($5)*.] 
81.18.  Kegan Paul, Trench (London). Edgar Allan Poe, Poems, introd.
Andrew Lang. "Parchment Library." Printed on front, spine, and
back (including quotation from reviews of the series). [Lilly.] 
81.19.  Routledge (London). Kate Greenaway, A Day in a Child's Life.
Pictorial. [Wilder cat. 9 (1984), item 52 ($850).] 
81.20.  Routledge (London). Kate Greenaway, Mother Goose. [Pirages cat.
10 (1986), item 288 ($300); cat. 15 (1985), item P ($375).] 
† 81.21.  Thorndike (Detroit). The Handy-Volume Shakespeare. 13 vols.
Green box, with printed label inside lid. [Leach sale (1984), lot 38
(one vol. lacking; $5).] 

1882

               
82.1.  Appleton (New York). Alfred Ayres, The Verbalist. Includes ad on
back. [Wilder cat. 72 (1995), item 6 ($295).] 
† 82.2.  Harper (New York). Samuel Adams Drake, The Heart of the White
Mountains.
Box with label. [Leach sale (1984), lot 42 ($50).] 
† 82.3.  Harper (New York). Robert Herrick, Selections from the Poetry, ill.
Edwin A. Abbey, ed. Alfred Pollard. Decorated box with lettering.
[Leach sale (1984), lot 43 ($45). Collection of Ellen K. Morris and
Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 
82.4  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
Pictorial jacket. [In stock of The Scholar Gypsy Ltd., March
1977 ($45).] 
82.5.  Moses King (Cambridge, Mass.). B. P. Shillaber, Wide-Swath Embracing
Lines in Pleasant Places.
Printed on front and spine (repeating
cover). [Leach sale (1984), lot 47 ($10).] 
82.6.  Lee & Shepard (Boston) and Charles T. Dillingham (New York).
John Howard Payne, Home Sweet Home. Printed on front (repeating
title-page). [Leach sale (1984), lot 44 ($5).] 
‡ 82.7.  Lee & Shepard (Boston). Rosa H. Thorpe, The Curfew Must Not
Ring Tonight.
Box with printed label; jacket. [Collection of Jacob
Blanck, 1970 (without jacket). Reported to me by Kevin Mac Donnell,
2005 (jacket).] 
82.8.  Lee & Shepard (Boston). J. T. Trowbridge, The Vagabonds. Printed
on front (including illustration from title-page). [Collection of G.
T. Tanselle, 2005; illustrated by him (1971), plate 7.] 

113

Page 113
           
† 82.9.  Lippincott (Philadelphia). Thomas Buchanan Read, Christine.
Box with printed label. [Leach sale (1984), lot 45 (not sold)*.] 
82.10.  Macmillan (London). Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Household
Stories,
trans. Lucy Crane, ill. Walter Crane. Printed in red on front
(repeating title-page), spine (including illustrations), and back
(ad). [Toronto Public Library (Osborne Collection).] 
† 82.11.  Anson D. F. Randolph (New York). S. Alice Bray, The Baby's
Journal.
Box. [Morrill cat. 219 (1976), item 293 ($12.50).] 
82.12.  Smith, Elder (London). John Addington Symonds, Animi Figura.
Printed in brown on front (repeating cover), spine(?), and back.
[Collection of Timothy d'Arch Smith, 1970 (spine missing); cited
by him in "Babington's Bibliography of John Addington Symonds:
Some Additions and Corrections," The Courier (Syracuse University
Library), 36 (Fall 1970), 22-27 (see p. 23).] 
82.13.  A. Williams (Boston). Tributes to Longfellow and Emerson by the
Massachusetts Historical Society.
[Cited by C. A. Wilson in Publishers'
Weekly,
117 (15 February 1930), 894-895; and by Rosner
(1954), p. xv.] 
† 82.14.  R. Worthingt à n (New York). Handy Illustrated Shakespeare. 8
vols. Green box with hinged lid. [Leach sale (1984), lot 46 ($10).] 

1883

               
83.1.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). George W. Peck, The Grocery Man
and Peck's Bad Boy.
[Houghton.] 
83.2.  Cupples, Upham (Boston). "Owen Innsly" [Lucy White Jennison],
Love Poems and Sonnets. 3rd ed. Printed in red on front; flaps (ca.
⅞″) at top and bottom as well as sides (and thus perhaps originally
a sealed wrapping?). [Collection of Herbert Kleist, 1977.] 
83.3.  Dodd, Mead (New York). Oliver Wendell Holmes, Grandmother's
Story of Bunker Hill Battle.
[In stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books,
2005.] 
83.4.  Ellis (Boston). Francis Power Cobb, Religious Duty. Printed on
spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 49 ($45).] 
83.5.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Elizabeth Akers Allen, Rock Me to Sleep,
Mother.
Printed on front. [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
83.6.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Hezekiah Butterworth, Zigzag Journeys
in Europe.
Printed on front (including blurbs), spine(?), and back
(ad for The Boys of '61). [Leach sale (1984), lot 48 ($20).] 
† 83.7.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard.
Box with printed label (book has unprinted jacket).
[Leach sale (1984), lot 51 (not sold)*.] 
83.8.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Friedrich Schiller, Song of the Bell. Light
green, printed on front in dark green. [Leach sale (1984), lot 52 ($5).] 

114

Page 114
                       
83.9.  George C. Hitt (Indianapolis). James Whitcomb Riley, "The Old
Swimmin' Hole" and 'Leven More Poems.
Brown, printed in red
(over wrappers). [Lemperley sale (1940), lot 817. Described by Anthony
J. and Dorothy R. Russo in A Bibliography of James Whitcomb
Riley
(1944), p. 3. Arthur Swann sale (1960), lot 359 ("slightly
chipped"). Black Sun Books cat. 49 (1978), item 67 ($950); cat. 70
(1986), item 142 ($550). Martin sale (1990), lot 2236 ($330; the
Swann copy, now "in fragments"). Reese cat. 153 (1996), item 557
($1000).] 
83.10.  Kohler Publishing Co. (Philadelphia). Biblische Geschichten.
Printed in brown on spine. [Collection of Ellen K. Morris and
Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 
83.11.  Lee & Shepard (Boston) and Charles T. Dillingham (New York).
Caroline C. Leighton, Life at Puget Sound. Printed on front and
spine with binding design. [Juvelis cat. 97-3) (1997), item 229
($250).] 
83.12.  Lee & Shepard (Boston) and Charles T. Dillingham (New York).
Augustus Montagu Toplady, Rock of Ages. Printed on front.
[Leach sale (1984), lot 54 (not sold).] 
83.13.  Lothrop (Boston). Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman], Decorative Plaques.
[Virginia (Barrett Collection).] 
83.14.  Charles Mann (New York). Laura M. Colvin, Belles and Beaux,
with Other Poems.
Printed on front and spine (repeating cover).
[Leach sale (1984), lot 50 ($5).] 
83.15.  Novello (London). Theo Marzials (ed.), Pan-Pipes: A Book of Old
Songs,
ill. Walter Crane. 2nd ed. Jacket includes illustration by
Crane. [Wilder cat. 34 (1989), item 62 ($350).] 
83.16.  James R. Osgood (Boston). Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dr. Grimshawe's
Secret.
Printed on front and spine. [Virginia (Barrett Collection).] 
83.17.  Kegan Paul, Trench (London). George Saintsbury (ed.), French
Lyrics.
"Parchment Library." Light blue, printed on front, spine,
and back (list of titles in "Parchment Library"). [Collection of
G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
83.18.  Putnam (New York). Proceedings at the Dinner Given by the Medical
Profession of the City of New York, April 12, 1883, to Oliver
Wendell Holmes.
[Cited by C. A. Wilson in Publishers' Weekly,
117 (15 February 1930), 894-895; and by Rosner (1954), p. xv.] 
83.19.  Revell (Chicago). Hannah Whitall Smith, The Christian's Secret
of a Happy Life.
Printed on front (including "Thirty-Fifth Thousand")
and back (ads). [Leach sale (1984), lot 53 ($55).] 
† 83.20.  White, Stokes & Allen (New York). Susie B. Skelding, Songs of
Flowers.
Box with printed label. [Collection of Jacob Blanck, 1970.] 

115

Page 115

1884

               
84.1.  Appleton (New York). William Cullen Bryant, Poetical Works
(1884 printing?). Printed on front (repeating cover), spine, and back
(ad, including Parke Godwin's 1883 biography of Bryant and his
1884 edition of Bryant's Prose Writings). [Juvelis cat. 96-1 (1996),
item 155 ($150).] 
84.2.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales,
trans. Mrs. H. B. Paull. Printed on front and spine (repeating cover)
and back (ads). [Leach sale (1984), lot 55 ($40).] 
† 84.3.  J. W. Bouton (New York). Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
through France and Italy.
Decorated folding cloth box. [Leach sale
(1984), lot 63 ($35).] 
84.4.  Clarendon Press (Oxford). James A. H. Murray (ed.), A New English
Dictionary on Historical Principles.
Jackets on original fascicles,
1884-1915, printed on front (repeating cover and title page, except
for border and imprint), spine (vertical: title, device, date, letters
covered), and back (advertisements, except the first one, which has
a blank back). (Fascicles were published both in quarterly "Sections"
[of 64, 128, or 192 pages] and, at irregular intervals, in
"Parts" that normally combined Sections into 320-page units;
therefore the number of fascicles in a complete set varies according
to the relative number of Sections and Parts it contains.) [Lilly
(50 fascicles in jackets through 1915); cited in Lilly Library Publication
No. 19, Printing and the Mind of Man (1973), item 340.
Collection of Sandy Malcolm, 2005 (75 fascicles in jackets through
1915). Collection of David Yerkes, 2005 (68 fascicles in jackets
through 1915).] 
84.5.  Donnelley, Loyd (Chicago). William H. Thomes, The Gold Hunter's
Adventures; or, Life in Australia.
Printed on front, spine, and
back (illustration from book). [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
84.6.  Fergus Printing Co. (Chicago). Ninian Edwards, The Edwards
Papers,
ed. E. B. Washburne. Chicago Historical Society Collections,
vol. 3. Printed on front and spine. [Wilder cat. 72 (1995), item 28
($175). Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
84.7.  Fergus Printing Co. (Chicago). Harvey Reid, Biographical Sketch
of Enoch Long, an Illinois Pioneer.
Chicago Historical Society Collections,
vol. 2. Printed on front and spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 60
($20). Wilder cat. 15 (1985), item BI ($235); list 87-A (1987), item 42
($180). Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
† 84.8.  Harper (New York). Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven, ill. Gustave
Doré. Blue box, printed in red on front. [Collection of Harrison
Hayford, 1970s. Leach cat. 81-4 (1981), item 202 ($250). Leach sale
(1984), lot 59 ($260). Collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S.
Levin, 2005.] 

116

Page 116
                     
‡ 84.9.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, ill.
Elihu Vedder. Box and jacket. [Phillips Hill Books cat. 13 (1999),
item 26 ($950).] 
84.10.  Lee & Shepard (Boston) and Charles T. Dillingham (New York).
T. Nelson Dale, The Outskirts of Physical Science. Printed on spine.
[Leach sale (1984), lot 56 ($5).] 
‡ 84.11.  Lee & Shepard (Boston). Ray Palmer, "My Faith Looks up to Thee."
(1) Box with printed label (book is in wrappers). (2) Jacket printed
on front, including date (book is in cloth). [(1) Leach sale (1984), lot
58 ($5). (2) Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005. Reported to me by
Kevin Mac Donnell, 2005.] 
84.12.  Lippincott (Philadelphia). J. T. Rothrock, Vacation Cruising in
Chesapeake and Delaware Bays.
Printed on front (repeating cover),
spine(?), and back (ad). [Leach sale (1984), lot 61 ($40). Finer cat.
19 (1985), item 323 ($125).] 
84.13.  Little, Brown (Boston). "Medicus" [Daniel Denison Slade],
Twelve Days in the Saddle. Pink, printed on front. [Leach sale
(1984), lot 62 ($45).] 
84.14.  Little, Brown (Boston). James Bradley Thayer, A Western Journey
with Mr. Emerson.
Printed on front (over vellum wrappers).
[Leach cat. 71-4 (1971), item 476 ($35). Leach sale (1984), lot 64
($40). Wilder cat. 15 (1985), item K ($150). Juvelis cat. 96-1 (1996),
item 67 ($600); 97-4 (1997), item 54 ($600). In stock of Mac Donnell
Rare Books, prior to 2005.] 
84.15.  Longmans, Green (London). Andrew Lang, The Princess Nobody.
Printed on front (including illustration from p. 51). [Lilly.] 
84.16.  Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier (Edinburgh). Anne S. Swann,
Carlowrie; or, Among Lothian Folk. Printed on front, spine, and
back (ad). [Ferret 1988 cat., item 133 (£65).] 
84.17.  Pu 9 nam (New York). Helen Kendrick Johnson (ed.), Short Sayings
of Famous Men.
Printed in red on front and spine (repeating cover)
and back (ads). [Leach sale (1984), lot 57 (not sold)*.] 
84.18.  Scribner (New York). "Ik Marvel" [Donald Grant Mitchell], Reveries
of a Bachelor.
Printed on spine. [Collection of G. T. Tanselle,
2005.] 
§ 84.19.  Thompson (New York). "Don Juan" [John E. Wheelock], In Search
of Gold: The Story of a Liberal Life.
Printed on front, spine, and
front flap (reading "Cut open at this line and use wrapper for outside
cover"). [Leach sale (1984), lot 65 ($32.50).] 

1885

   
85.1.  Appleton (New York). Alfred Ayres, The Verbalist. Printed on
front, spine, and back (ad for "Valuable Hand-Books"). [In stock
of Mac Donnell Rare Books, 2005.] 
85.2.  Appleton (New York). John Bach McMaster, A History of the
People of the United States.
Vol. 2. Printed on front, spine, and
back. [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005 (my copy of vol. 1, 1883,
lacks the jacket; my copies of vols. 3-5, 1900, have the jackets).] 

117

Page 117
                           
85.3.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). George Eliot, Felix Holt. Ads for
Sohmer Pianos et al. on back. [Leach sale (1984), lot 69 ($5).] 
‡ 85.4.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). George Eliot, Works. 7 vols. Box with
printed label (calling for 8 vols., but 7 fill the box); jackets printed
on spines. [Leach sale (1984), lot 70 ($30).] 
85.5.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). W. F. Gill (ed.), Papyrus Leaves.
Printed on front (repeating title-page) [and other surfaces?]. [In
stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, prior to 2005.] 
85.6.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). "Siva" [Norman Carolan Perkins], A
Man of Destiny.
Printed in red on front, spine, and back (advertisement
for the book itself). [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
85.7.  Adam & Charles Black (Edinburgh). Walter Scott, Waverley
Novels.
"Centenary Edition." 25 vols., 1885-87. Pink, printed in
brownish red on front, spine, back (ad on vols. 6-25), and flaps
(vols. 6-25). [Ferret 1988 cat., item 123 (£385).] 
Clarendon Press (Oxford). See 1884. 
85.8.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Lizzie W. Champney, Three Vassar Girls
in South America.
Lavender paper, printed on front (including
large picture and price), spine, and back (ad for six other books,
with picture). [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005. Another copy
seen at booth of Tavistock Books, New York Book Fair, 28 April
2005 ($495).] 
85.9.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes.
Printed on front. [Collection of Jacob Blanck, 1970.] 
85.10.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Edgar Allan Poe, Lenore. Printed on
front. [In stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, 2005.] 
85.11.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Henry W. Longfellow, The Early
Poems.
Printed on front and spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 73 ($10).] 
85.12.  Lee & Shepard (Boston). Michelangelo Buonarroti, Selected Poems.
Printed on front and spine (repeating cover). [Leach sale (1984), lot
66 (not sold)*.] 
† 85.13.  Lee & Shepard (Boston) and Charles T. Dillingham (New York).
Eleanor Talbot (ed., ill.), My Lady's Casket. Brown paper-covered
box, with printed top panel. [Collection of Ellen K. Morris and
Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 
85.14.  Lippincott (Philadelphia). Gabriel Harrison, John Howard Payne.
Rev. ed. Printed on front (including a musical staff, different from
the cover) and spine. [O'Neal cat. 13 (1976), item 29 ($35). Cedric
L. Robinson cat. 130 (1977), item 302 ($10), offering "new copies
in the original printed dust jacket." Leach sale (1984), lot 71 (two
copies, not sold). Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
85.15.  Lippincott (Philadelphia). Joseph A. Nunes, A Song of the Isle of
Cuba,
ill. F. C. Lummis. Printed on front and spine. [Leach sale
(1984), lot 74 ($10).] 

118

Page 118
             
85.16.  Macmillan (London). Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies. New
ed., ill. Linley Sambourne. [Toronto Public Library (Osborne Collection).
Cited by John S. Hayes in AB Bookman's Weekly, 66 (17
November 1980), 3295.] 
85.17.  McLoughlin Brothers (New York). Josephine Pollard, Our Hero
General U. S. Grant.
Jacket repeats cover illustrations. [Leach sale
(1984), lot 75 ($10).] 
85.18.  J. S. Ogilvie (New York). Mrs. M. A. Holmes, Woman against
Woman.
Printed on front, spine, and back. [Ohio State (Charvat
Collection); cited by Tibbetts (1973), p. 42.] 
85.19.  Kegan Paul, Trench (London). Andrew Lang, Rhymes à la Mode.
Printed on front and spine. [Lilly.] 
85.20.  Kegan Paul, Trench (London). Edgar Allan Poe, Poems, introd.
Andrew Lang. "Parchment Library." [Lilly.] 
85.21.  Roberts Brothers (Boston). Charles T. Brooks, Poems, Original
and Translated.
[Virginia (Barrett Collection).] 
85.22.  Smith, Elder (London). A Journel Kept by Richard Doyle in the
Year 1840,
introd. J. Hungerford Pollen. Printed on front and spine.
[Seen at Ulysses Bookshop, October 2003.] 

1886

               
86.2.  Adam & Charles Black (Edinburgh). Walter Scott, Waverley
Prayers for Church and Home.
Black paper-covered hinged box.
[Collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 
86.2.  Adam & Charles Black (Edinburgh). Walter Scott, Waverley
Novels.
"Centenary Edition." 25 vols., 1885-87. Pink, printed in
brownish red on front, spine, back (ad on vols. 6-25), and flaps
(vols. 6-25). [Ferret 1988 cat., item 123 (£385).] 
86.3.  Cassell (New York). Jeannette H. Walworth, Without Blemish:
To-Day's Problem
[Negro blood]. [Mott cat. 202 (1979), item 194
($75, a copy "almost without blemish").] 
86.4.  Century (New York). Maurice Thompson, The Boys' Book of
Sports and Outdoor Life.
Printed in dark brown on front and spine.
[Leach sale (1984), lot 88 ($80).] 
86.5.  Chatto & Windus (London). Bret Harte, The Queen of the Pirate
Isle.
Printed in color with name of illustrator, Kate Greenaway,
noted. [Hime Biblioasis One cat. (1980), item 49 ($1000, with full-page
photograph of front on p. 23).] 
Clarendon Press (Oxford). See 1884. 
86.6.  Dutton (New York). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Wreck
of the Hesperus.
[Collection of Herbert Kleist, 1970.] 
† 86.7.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Thomas Hood, Fair Ines. Box with
printed label. [Leach sale (1984), lot 83 ($5)*.] 

119

Page 119
                       
86.8.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Edgar Allan Poe, Lenore. Printed on
front. [Wilder cat. 9 (1984), item 97 ($1750); cat. 15 (1985), item Z
($1250); list 87-A (1987), item 39 ($750); cat. 34 (1989), item 197
($750).] 
86.9.  Gilliss Bros. & Turnure, The Art Age Press (New York). Charles
Du Haijs, The Percheron Horse. [Mott cat. 215 (1986), item 53
($500).] 
86.10.  Griffith Farran (London). Edith Nesbit and Robert E. Mack
(eds.), Summer Songs and Sketches. Printed on front (includes pictorial
design not in book); jacket encloses thin booklet and has no
spine. [Described in Ferret 1988 cat., item 1 (£175).] 
86.11.  Harper (New York). Lee Meriwether, A Tramp Trip. Printed on
spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 84 ($5)*.] 
86.12.  Harper (New York). Howard Pyle, Pepper & Salt; or, Seasoning
for Young Folk.
Printed on front. [Houghton. Leach sale (1984),
lot 85 ($160).] 
86.13.  Charles Hindley (London). Charles Hindley, The History of the
Catnach Press.
Blue, printed on front, spine, back (including comment
on Catnach), and flaps (all surfaces including woodcuts; 41
mm. of each flap turned in and pasted down for strength, perhaps
by former owner). [Collection of Peter C. G. Isaac, 1975; discussed
by him (1975), pp. 51-52 (illustrated). Seen at booth of Tavistock
Books, New York Book Fair, 28 April 2005 ($475).] 
86.14.  C. F. Lawrence (Worcester, Mass.). Ferdinand Gagnon: Sa vie et
ses oeuvres.
Printed on front. [Leach sale (1984), lot 81 ($5).] 
‡ 86.15.  Lee & Shepard (Boston) and Charles T. Dillingham (New York).
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dora. Box; jacket printed on front (repeating
title-page) and back (ad). [Leach sale (1984), lot 86 (without
jacket; not sold); lot 87 (without box; $27.50). In stock of Mac
Donnell Rare Books, 2005 (without box).] 
86.16.  Sampson Low (London). Jules Verne, Mathias Sandorf. Light blue,
printed in dark blue. [Ferret cat. Q88 (January 1990), item 575
(£650).] 
86.17.  J. S. Ogilvie (New York). T. DeWitt Talmage, The Marriage Ring:
A Series of Sermons.
Printed on front (with illustration and frame
different from cover and title-page), spine (with title The Wedding
Ring
), and back. [Brick Row Bookshop cat. 98 (1973), item 747
($20). Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
86.18.  Kegan Paul, Trench (London). Edward Dowden, The Life of
Percy Bysshe Shelley.
2 vols. [Seen at Ximenes Book Shop, 18 June
1979 ($50).] 
86.19.  Providence Press Company (Providence, R.I.). William F. Hutchinson,
A Winter Holiday. Printed on front. [Cited by John T.
Winterich in Publishers' Weekly, 117 (18 January 1930), 351-352;
and by Rosner (1954), p. xv.] 

120

Page 120
   
86.20.  Rice & Drake [printer] (Waltham, Mass.). "Didama" [Betsy Ann
White], Three Holes in the Chimney; or, A Scattered Family.
Printed on front (including decorative rules at top and bottom
extending onto spine). [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
86.21.  Scribner (New York). Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy.
[Cited by John S. Van E. Kohn in Publishers' Weekly, 132
(30 October 1937), 1732-35.] 

1887

                           
87.1.  Allbut & Daniel (Hanley). "A Middy," Charles Wyndham. Pictorial
spine. [Wilder cat. 15 (1985), item W ($225).] 
87.2.  Appleton (New York). Ralph Abercromby, Weather. [Wilder cat.
70 (1994), item 1 ($225).] 
87.3.  Appleton (New York). Alfred M. Mayer and Charles Barnard,
Light. "The Experimental Science Series." Ad on back for the series.
[Leach sale (1984), lot 92 ($5).] 
87.4.  Arnold & Co. (Philadelphia). Mrs. S. T. Rorer, Canning and Preserving.
Printed on front, spine, and back. [Leach sale (1984), lot 93
($12.50).] 
87.5.  Adam & Charles Black (Edinburgh). Walter Scott, Waverley Novels.
"Centenary Edition." 25 vols., 1885-87. Pink, printed in brownish
red on front, spine, back (ad on vols. 6-25), and flaps (vols.
6-25). [Ferret 1988 cat., item 123 (£385).] 
87.6.  A. L. Burt (New York). Augusta Evans Wilson, At the Mercy of
Tiberius.
Printed on front and spine (repeating cover) and back
(ad). [In stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, 2005.] 
87.7.  Cassell (New York). J. H. Chadwick, The Whole Truth. Printed
on front, spine, and back. [Kent State; cited by Keller (1971), p. 33.] 
† 87.8.  Cassell (New York). Walter Scott, Christmas in the Olden Time,
ill. Childe Hassam et al. Box, lettered on top. [Leach sale (1984),
lot 94 ($40).] 
Clarendon Press (Oxford). See 1884. 
† 87.9.  Harper (New York). William Hamilton Gibson, Happy Hunting-Grounds.
Box with printed label. [Leach sale (1984), lot 90 ($45).] 
87.10.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Jack the
Fisherman.
Printed on front. [Pennsylvania State University.] 
87.11.  Longmans, Green (London). Charles Deulin, Johnny Nut and The
Golden Goose,
trans. Andrew Lang. Printed in brown on front and
spine (repeating signed cover design by W. Reader). [Lilly. Collection
of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 
87.12.  Lothrop (Boston). John Brownjohn, The Exploits of Miltiades
Peterkin Paul.
Printed on front (repeating title-page) and back (ad).
[Leach sale (1984), lot 89 (not sold).] 
87.13.  Lovejoy's Library (Reading). E. W. [Elizabeth Waterhouse], The
Island of Anarchy.
Printed in red on front. [Wilder cat. 15 (1985), 

121

Page 121
               
item HI ($650); list 87-A (1987), item 54 ($685). Ferret 1988 cat.,
item 144 (not for sale; reports having seen another copy in jacket).] 
87.14.  Kegan Paul, Trench (London). Andrew Lang, Rhymes à la Mode.
Printed on front, spine, and back. [Lilly.] 
84.15.  Putnam (New York). Washington Irving, Works. 12 vols. "Tappan
Zee Edition." Printed on spines. [Leach sale (1984, lot 91 (10 vols.;
not sold).] 
87.16.  Franklin P. Rice (Worcester, Mass.). Sancta Croce: A Nicotian
Treatise.
Printed on front (with title) and back ("Q.B.C." [Quinsigamond
Boat Club]—thus possibly not the publisher's jacket; but
it may be because the title of the book is printed). [Leach sale
(1984), lot 95 ($25; two copies).] 
87.17.  Roberts Brothers (Boston). Albion Tourgée, Button's Inn.
Printed on front and spine. [Collection of Roger E. Stoddard,
1970.] 
87.18.  Walter Scott (London). Walt Whitman, Specimen Days in America.
[In stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, prior to 2005.] 
87.19.  Scribner (New York). H. C. Bunner, The Story of a New York
House.
Printed in lavender on front (including illustration, as on
cover, by A. B. Frost), spine, and back (advertisement for other
Bunner books). [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
87.20.  Scribner (New York). Harold Frederic, Seth's Brother's Wife.
[Swann sale 968, 14 November 1974, lot 214. In stock of Serendipity
Books, May 1979.] 

1888

         
† 88.1.  Samuel E. Cassino (Boston). Lurabel Harlow, Louisa May Alcott:
A Souvenir.
Box with printed label. [In stock of Mac Donnell Rare
Books, prior to 2005.] 
88.2.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). George Macdonald, Wilfrid Cumbermede.
"Caxton Edition." Printed on front and spine (repeating
cover) and back and flaps (ads for "Best Edition of Caxton 12mos").
[Leach sale (1984), lot 108 (not sold).] 
88.3.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). Dinah Maria Mulock, John Halifax,
Gentleman.
"Caxton Edition." Printed on front and spine (with
design for the series, incorporating space where title of book is
printed in red) and back (list of 200 titles in "1888 Edition"). [Collection
of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
88.4.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). "Fanny Fern" [Sara Payson Parton],
Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-Folio. "Caxton Edition." Printed
on front, spine, and back (ad for "Caxton 12mos"). [Leach sale
(1984), lot 112 ($5).] 
88.5.  Century (New York). Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the
Hunting-Trail.
Front includes illustration by George Wharton
Edwards. [Reported to me by Anthony Fair, 1970; Parke-Bernet's
"PB-84" cat. 114 (6 November 1970), lot 161; bought by Charles H.
Leavell; illustrated by Tanselle (1971), plate 8.] 

122

Page 122
                             
88.6.  Clarendon Press (Oxford). Perrault's Popular Tales, ed. Andrew
Lang. Printed on spine. [Lilly.] 
Clarendon Press (Oxford). See also 1884. 
88.7.  Crowell (New York). Leo Tolstoy, What Men Live By. Printed
on front. [In stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, 2005 (later printing?).]  
† 88.8.  Dodd, Mead (New York). Elizabeth W. Little, A Log-Book: Notes
through Life.
Pictorial box, with label repeating front cover. [Leach
sale (1984), lot 106 ($10)*. Finer cat. 21 (1985), item 247 ($35).] 
88.9.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Elizabeth W. Champney, Three Vassar
Girls in France.
Pictorial jacket; ad on back for "Capital Books for
Young People." [Leach sale (1984), lot 102 ($30)*.] 
88.10.  Harper (New York). Charles Follen Adams, Dialect Ballads.
Printed on front (including blurb) and spine (including price).
[Leach sale (1984), lot 96 ($37.50).] 
88.11.  Harper (New York). George T. Fish, A Guide to the Conduct of
Meetings.
Printed on spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 104 (not sold)*.] 
88.12.  Harper (New York). Kirk Munroe, Derrick Sterling. "Young
People Series." [Virginia (Barrett Collection).] 
88.13.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). John Fiske, The Critical Period of
American History, 1783-1789.
Printed on spine. [Leach sale (1984),
lot 105 (not sold)*.] 
88.14.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Oliver Wendell Holmes, Before the
Curfew and Other Poems, Chiefly Occasional.
Printed on front
(with title and lyre, as on cover). [Beinecke. Houghton. Huntington.
James Cummins cat. 16 (1985), item 168 ("Sold"). In stock of
Robert Rulon-Miller, 21 October 1988. Collection of G. T. Tanselle
(2 copies), 2005.] 
88.15.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). James Russell Lowell, Heartsease
and Rue.
Printed in dark green on front and spine (repeating
cover). [Leach sale (1984), lot 107 ($40).] 
88.16.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Olive Thorne Miller, In Nesting
Time.
Printed on spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 109 ($5)*.] 
88.17.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer, Henry
Hobson Richardson and His Work.
Printed on front. [Newberry.
Collection of Richard S. Barnes, 1970s.] 
88.18.  Jordan, Marsh (Boston). Frances Hodgson Burnett, Editha's Burglar.
Printed on front (repeating cover) and back (ads). [Leach sale
(1984), lot 100 ($80). Martin sale (1990), lot 2315 ($330 for lot of
four volumes). Seen at Books of Wonder, 26 March 1994.] 
88.19.  Longmans, Green (London). A. G. Steel and R. H. Lyttelton,
Cricket. "The Badminton Library." Printed on front and spine.
[Lilly.] 

123

Page 123
                     
† 88.20.  Lothrop (Boston). Emma Huntington Nason, White Sails. Box
with printed label. [Leach sale (1984), lot 111 (not sold)*.] 
88.21.  Joel Munsell's Sons (Albany). American Ancestry. Vol. 3. Jacket
repeats cover. [Leach sale (1984), lot 97 ($5).] 
88.22.  Obpacher Bros. (Munich and New York). C. W. Reed and Louis
K. Harlow, Bits of Camp Life. Printed in brown on front (with
illustration). [Leach sale (1984), lot 474 ($35). Wilder cat. 20 (1986),
item 8A ($225).] 
88.23.  Kegan Paul, Trench (London). Andrew Lang, XXXII Ballades
in Blue China.
Printed on front, spine, and back. [Lilly.] 
88.24.  Porter & Coates (Philadelphia). T. S. Arthur, Orange Blossoms.
"Alta Edition" (No. 59). Advertising on back lists titles in series
through No. 162 (1888). [Collection of Herbert Kleist, 1970.] 
¢ 88.25.  Anson D. F. Randolph (New York). Fanny B. Bates (ed.), Between
the Lights.
Blue cloth, printed in gold on spine. [Leach sale (1984),
lot 99 ($20; two copies).] 
88.26.  Routledge (London). Kate Greenaway, Almanack for 1889. [Reese
cat. 40 (1986), item 292 ($200).] 
88.27.  Scribner (New York). Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sara Crewe.
Printed on front, spine, and back (ad). [Kent State; cited by Keller
(1971), p. 33. Seen at Books of Wonder, 26 March 1994. Juvelis cat.
97-3 (1997), item 82 ($2000).] 
88.28.  Scribner (New York). "Ik Marvel" [Donald Grant Mitchell], Reveries
of a Bachelor.
[Noted by Harrison Hayford in stock of D. C.
Allen, 1970s. In stock of Serendipity Books, August 1979.] 
88.29.  J. Stilman Smith (Boston). Edward Everett Hale, My Friend the
Boss.
Printed on front (with title page, including date). [Virginia
(Barrett Collection). Minkoff cat. 86-C (1986), item 66 ($275).] 
88.30.  Stokes (New York). "Owen Meredith" [Edward Bulwer-Lytton],
Lucile [title-page dated 1888]. Printed on spine (with publisher as
"White, Stokes & Allen" [1883-87]). [Collection of Herbert Kleist,
1977.] 

1889

       
89.1.  American Publishers (New York). Mayne Reid et al., Stories about
Animals.
New Edition. "The Berkeley Series of Books for Boys."
Printed on front and spine (repeating cover) and back (ad for series).
[Leach sale (1984), lot 125 ($7.50).] 
89.2.  Appleton (New York). David Kay, Memory. "The International
Education Series." Printed in brown, with ad for series on back.
[Leach sale (1984), lot 121 ($5).] 
89.3.  Art Lithograph Publishing Co. (Munich and New York). James
Russell Lowell, An Indian Summer Reverie. Pictorial jacket. [In
stock of Tamerlane Books, prior to 2000 ($100).] 
89.4.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. "Caxton
Edition." Jacket with design for series. [Juvelis cat. 96-1 (1996),
item 154 ($150).] 

124

Page 124
                           
89.5.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). Jane Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw.
Printed on front and spine (repeating cover) and back and flaps
(ads). [Leach sale (1984), lot 124 ($5).] 
89.6.  Robert Bonner's Sons (New York). Oliver Dyer, Great Senators
of the United States Forty Years Ago.
Printed on front and spine
(repeating cover). [Georgetown University, Leach sale (1984), lot
117 (not sold).] 
89.7.  Clarendon Press (Oxford). Francis T. Palgrave (ed.), The Treasury
of Sacred Song.
Printed in blue and red. [Wilder cat. 61 (1993), p.
16 ($375); cat. 72 (1995), item 43 ($375).] 
Clarendon Press (Oxford). See also 1884. 
89.8.  Dillingham (New York). Linn B. Porter, Thou Shalt Not (New
Series
). Printed on front, spine, and back. [Ohio State (Charvat
Collection); cited by Tibbetts (1973), p. 42.] 
89.9.  Dodd, Mead (New York). Bayard Tuckerman, Life of General
Lafayette.
Limited edition. 2 vols. Printed on spines. [Leach sale
(1984), lot 127 ($20).] 
89.10.  R. R. Donnelley (Chicago). Ernest Ingersoll, The Crest of the
Continent.
Printed in brown on front and spine (repeating cover).
[Leach sale (1984), lot 119 ($30).] 
89.11.  R. R. Donnelley (Chicago). Stanley Wood, Over the Range to the
the Golden Gate.
[Hunley cat. 53 (1981), item 426 ($50).] 
89.12.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Elizabeth W. Champney, Three Vassar
Girls Abroad.
Printed on front (including illustration and price),
spine, and back (ad). [Leach sale (1984), lot 116 ($30).] 
89.13.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Charles B. Cory, The Birds of the West
Indies.
Printed on spine. [Seen at Selected Works (Chicago), 20
August 1996.] 
89.14.  Griffith, Farran, O Keden & Welsh (London). E. Oxenford and
A. Scott Gatty, Sing Me a Song. Printed on front and back. [Bodleian
(John Carter Collection).] 
‡ 89.15.  Harper (New York). Old Songs, ill. Edwin A. Abbey and Alfred
Parsons. Decorated box; jacket printed on front. [Leach sale (1984),
lot 122 ($10).] 
‡ 89.16.  Harper (New York). Lew Wallace, The Boyhood of Christ. Box
with printed label and a folding side; jacket printed in green on
front. [New York University (Fales Collection): 2 copies, both in
jacket, one in box. Leach sale (1984), lot 128 ($17.50). Collection of
G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
¢ 89.17.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble
Faun.
2 vols. Red cloth, printed in gold on spine. [Collection of
Charles Gullans, 1971.] 

125

Page 125
                       
89.18.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Jack the
Fisherman.
Printed on front. [Leach sale (1984), lot 123 (not sold).] 
89.19.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). F Hopkinson Smith, A White Umbrella
in Mexico.
Printed on front (including drawing of umbrella)
and spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 126 ($30). Collection of G. T.
Tanselle, 2005.] 
89.20.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Kate Douglas Wiggin, The Bird's
Christmas Carol.
Printed on front and spine (repeating cover). [In
stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, 2005.] 
89.21.  Longmans, Green (London). Richard Jefferies, Field and Hedgerow.
2nd printing. Green, printed on front and spine (derived
from cover). [Described in George Miller and Hugoe Matthews's
Richard Jefferies: A Bibliographical Study (1993), entry B26.3 (pp.
538-539).] 
89.22.  Longmans, Green (London). Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book.
Printed on front and spine. [Lilly; cited by Josiah Q. Bennett in
The David A. Randall Retrospective Memorial Exhibition:
Twenty Years' Acquisitions
(1975), entry 123.] 
89.23.  Lothrop (Boston). Laura D. Nichols, Lotus Bay: A Summer on
Cape Cod.
Printed on front (including title-page illustration),
spine, and back. [Juvelis cat. 94-4 (1994), item 10 ($175); cat. 97-3
(1997), item 94 ($175).] 
89.24.  Sampson Low (London). Ernest Giles, Australia Twice Traversed.
2 vols. Printed on front (including illustration from cover) and
spine. [Hordern House cat. of 1999, item 43 (illustrated; $17,500).] 
89.25.  David McKay (Philadelphia). Gems from Walt Whitman, ed.
Elizabeth Porter Gould. [Waiting for Godot Books cat. 37 (1998),
item 1943 ($2750, inscribed and annotated by editor).] 
‡ 89.26.  Putnam (New York). Washington Irving, The Life of George
Washington.
"Limited Centennial Edition." 5 vols. Separate box
for each volume; jackets printed in brown on front and spine.
[Leach sale (1984), lot 120 ($100).] 
89.27.  Routledge (London). Octave Feuillet, The Romance of a Poor
Young Man.
Printed on front and back (including color illustrations
by Ludovic Mouchot) and spine. [Seen at William Hale
Bookshop, 15 October 1993 ($250). Collection of Ellen K. Morris
and Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 
89.28.  Routledge (London). Kate Greenaway, Almanack for 1890. Printed
in brown on front. [Collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S.
Levin, 2005 (in plain mailing envelope).] 
89.29.  Frederick Warne (London). Horace, The Odes, Epodes, Satires,
and Epistles.
"Chandos Classics." Printed on spine (including
"Chandos Classics No. 132" [number not given in book]). [Collection
of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 

126

Page 126
   
89.30.  Whittet & Shepperson (Richmond, Va.). Carlton McCarthy, Our
Distingished Fellow-Citizens.
Green, printed on front. [Seen at
Antiquariat Hindricks, 23 October 1993 ($125).] 
89.31.  Charles Whittingham [printer] (London). A. H. Bullen (ed.),
Musa Proteria: Love Poems of the Restoration. Maroon, printed
on spine. [Collection of Herbert Kleist, 1977. Wilder list 87-A
(1987), item 4 ($100).] 

1890

                   
90.1.  American Humane Education Society (Boston). Anna Sewell,
Black Beauty (with stamp on contents page reading "Presented
by James Hislap & Co., New London, Conn. Xmas 1890"). Jacket
has imprint of James Hislap & Co. [Wilder cat. 15 (1985), item
CI ($350).] 
90.2.  Appleton (New York). Arabella B. Buckley, Through Magic
Glasses and Other Lectures.
Printed in black and red on front and
spine (repeating cover) and back (ad). [Leach sale (1984), lot 136
($10).] 
90.3.  Adam & Charles Black (Edinburgh). Walter Scott, The Antiquary.
"The Waverley Novels." Printed on front, spine, back, and flaps.
[Bodleian (John Carter Collection).] 
Clarendon Press (Oxford). See 1884. 
90.4.  Crowell (New York). Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days.
"Luxembourg Edition." Printed in brown on front and spine.
[Leach sale (1984), lot 147 (not sold)*.] 
90.5.  Donohue, Henneberry (Chicago). W. Gilmore Simms, Border
Beagles.
"Caxton Edition" (No. 10). Printed on front (repeating
cover), spine (repeating cover, plus series number), and back (list of
series). [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
90.6.  Donohue, Henneberry (Chicago). W. Gilmore Simms, Katharine
Walton.
"Caxton Edition" (No. 53). Printed on front (repeating
cover), spine (repeating cover, plus series number), and back (list of
series). [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
90.7.  Donohue, Henneberry (Chicago). W. Gilmore Simms, Mellichampe.
"Caxton Edition" (No. 61). Printed on front (repeating
cover), spine (repeating cover, plus series number), and back (list of
series). [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
90.8.  Donohue, Henneberry (Chicago). W. Gilmore Simms, Woodcraft.
"Caxton Edition" (No. 106). Printed on front (repeating cover),
spine (repeating cover, plus series number), and back (list of series).
[Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 
90.9.  Donohue, Henneberry (Chicago). W. Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee.
"Caxton Edition" (No. 107). Printed on front (repeating
cover), spine (repeating cover, plus series number), and back (list
of series). [Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005.] 

127

Page 127
                               
90.10.  Dunlap Society (New York). Laurence Hutton and William Carey
(eds.), Occasional Addresses. Jacket over wrappers. [Leaves of Grass
cat. 8 (1979), item 13.] 
¢ 90.11.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). George Eliot, Romola. 2 vols. Red cloth,
printed in gold on spine. [Reported to National Library of Canada,
January 1976. In stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, 2005.] 
90.12.  Estes & Lauriat (Boston). Fred A. Ober, The Knockabout Club in
North Africa.
Printed in brown on front (including illustration and
ad), spine(?), and back (ad for "Entertaining Juveniles"). [Leach
sale (1984), lot 155 ($20).] 
90.13.  Fergus Printing Co. (Chicago). Edward G. Mason, Early Chicago
and Illinois.
Chicago Historical Society Collections, vol. 4. [Reported
to me by Terence Tanner, 18 October 1972.] 
90.14.  Harper (New York). Lafcadio Hearn, Youma. Yellow, printed on
spine. [Virginia (Barrett Collection); described by Crane (Summer
1973), p. 37.] 
90.15.  Harper (New York). William Dean Howells, The Shadow of a
Dream.
[Cited by Alexander S. Graham in Publishers' Weekly, 117
(18 January 1930), 351-352; and by Rosner (1954), p. xv, as the
"earliest known USA pictorial dust jacket."] 
90.16.  Harper (New York). Jorge Isaacs, María, introd. Thomas A.
Janvier. Printed on spine. [New York University (Fales Collection).] 
90.17.  Harper (New York). Thomas A. Janvier, The Aztec Treasure-House.
[Virginia (Barrett Collection).] 
90.18.  Harper (New York). Modern Ghosts, introd. George William
Curtis. Printed on spine. [New York University (Fales Collection).] 
‡ 90.19.  Harper (New York). Austin Dobson et al., "The Quiet Life":
Certain Verses by Various Hands.
Decorated box; jacket printed in
red on front. [Leach sale (1984), lot 159 (not sold).] 
90.20.  Harper (New York). Giovanni Verga, The House by the MedlarTree,
introd. William Dean Howells. Printed on spine. [New York
University (Fales Collection).] 
90.21.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Wyndham
Towers.
Printed on spine. [Boss cat. 7 (1991), item 2. Sumner &
Stillman cat. 52 (1994), item 2 ($195).] 
† 90.22.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble
Faun.
2 vols. Red cloth box, with gold lettering on end (books are
in unprinted red cloth jackets). [Wilder list 87-A (1987), item 28
(lacks box; $185). Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005. In stock of
Mac Donnell Rare Books, 2005.] 
90.23.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Sarah Orne Jewett, Strangers and
Wayfarers.
Green jacket. [Amherst College.] 
90.24.  Houghton Mifflin (Boston). John Greenleaf Whittier, Legends
and Lyrics.
[In stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, prior to 2005.] 
† 90.25.  Joseph Knight (Boston). Walter Kittredge, Tenting on the Old
Camp Ground.
Box with printed label. [Leach sale (1984), lot 149
($10).] 

128

Page 128
                         
90.26.  Little, Brown (Boston). Nora Perry, Another Flock of Girls.
Printed in brown (including illustration on front). [Leach sale
(1984), lot 156 ($25).] 
90.27.  Longmans, Green (London). Andrew Lang, The Red Fairy Book.
Printed on front and spine. [Lilly.] 
90.28.  Lothrop (Boston). Margaret Sidney, An Adirondack Cabin.
Printed in dark green and red on front and spine (repeating cover).
[Leach sale (1984), lot 162 ($20).] 
90.29.  National Book Co. (New York). Matilda Betham-Edwards, For
One and the World.
Red, printed on spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot
130 (not sold).] 
90.30.  National Book Co. (New York). D. Christie Murray and Henry
Herman, The Bishop's Bible. Printed on spine. [Leach sale (1984),
lot 153 (not sold).] 
90.31.  Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner (London). Andrew Lang, Rhymes
à la Mode.
Printed on front, spine, and back. [Lilly.] 
†¢ 90.32.  Porter & Coates (Philadelphia). George Eliot, Romola. Large
paper. 2 vols. Box with lettering; red cloth jackets, printed on
spines. [Bradley cat. 36 (1974), item 262 (without box?). Lawrence
sale (1983), lot 209 (without box; [3 vols.?]). Leach sale (1984), lot
142 (two copies, both in box, one in jacket; not sold). Wilder cat.
15 (1985), item J ($100).] 
¢ 90.33.  Porter & Coates (Philadelphia). Grace and Philip Wharton, The
Wits and Beaux of Society.
Large paper. 2 vols. Red cloth, printed
on spines. [Seen at Book Barn, Wells, Me., 15 August 1993 ($35).] 
¢ 90.34.  Rand, McNally (Chicago). Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days
of Pompeii.
2 vols. Red cloth, printed on front and spine. [Leach
sale (1984), lot 151 ($5)*.] 
90.35.  Rand, McNally (Chicago). G. O. Shields, Camping and Camp
Outfits.
Printed on front and spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 161
($55).] 
90.36.  Roberts Brothers (Boston). Hamilton Wright Mabie, Our New
England, Her Nature Described.
Printed on front and spine.
[Beinecke: 2 copies.] 
90.37.  Routledge (London). Kate Greenaway, Almanack for 1891. Back
flap larger than the front, to be wrapped around the fore-edge and
sealed to create a mailing envelope (space for postage stamp is part
of the printed front panel). [Wilder cat. 9 (1984), item 51 ($675);
cat. 15 (1985), item Q ($275).] 
90.38.  Routledge (New York). Hugh Craig, Grand Army Picture Book.
Printed on front, spine, and back (repeating panorama from cover).
[Leach sale (1984), lot 139 ($85).] 

129

Page 129
         
90.39.  Routledge (New York). Hugh Craig, Great African Travellers.
Printed on front (and perhaps other surfaces). [Collection of
Michael Zinman, 1995.] 
90.40.  Schirmer (New York). Rebekah Crawford and Louise Morgan Still,
Musicians in Rhyme for Childhood's Time, ill. Albert D. Blashfield.
Printed in brown on front and back (repeating cover). [Leach sale
(1984), lot 140 (not sold).] 
90.41.  Scribner (New York). "Ik Marvel" [Donald Grant Mitchell], Reveries
of a Bachelor.
Printed on spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 152
(not sold).] 
90.42.  Stokes (New York). "Owen Meredith" [Edward Bulwer-Lytton],
Lucile. [Collection of Herbert Kleist, 1970: imprint on spine conforms
to style of firm name from 1887 to 1890; imprint on title-page
of this copy conforms to style that began in 1890.] 
90.43.  Whidden (Boston), J. H. Emerton, The Structure and Habits of
Spiders.
Printed on spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 143 ($15).] 

Approximate Dates

Circa 1865

 
† X.1.  T. Nelson (London). Barbara Hofland, "Mrs. Hofland's Library for
the Young" (ca. 1865). 4 vols. Box with label (label imprint is "New
York: T. Nelson & Sons"). [Leach sale (1984), lot 4 ($30).] 

1870s

 
X.2.  Putnam (New York). Washington Irving, The Conquest of Granada
(1870s). "Handy Volume Edition." Printed in dark green,
with initials "RWC" in lower corner. [Wilder cat. 15 (1985), item
U ($45); list 87-A (1987), item 32 ($150).] 

Circa 1877-79

 
X.3.  Sampson Low (London). Harrison Weir (ed.), The Poetry of Nature
(ca. 1877-79). Printed on front with American imprint ("New
York: Scribner, Welford & Armstrong"). [Leach sale (1984), lot
13 ($20).] 

Circa 1880

   
X.4.  Appleton (New York). William Cullen Bryant, Poetical Works
(ca. 1880). Printed on front and spine (repeating cover) and back
(ad). [Leach sale (1984), lot 23 ($20).] 
† X.5.  Routledge (London). Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (ca. 1880).
"Routledge's Illustrated Edition of the Poets." Box with printed
label (including list of other titles in series). [Collection of Ellen K.
Morris and Edward S. Levin, 2005.] 

130

Page 130

Circa 1880s

 
X.6.  Hodder & Stoughton (London). Walter Scott, In Ye Olden Time
(ca. 1880s). Printed on front and back (derived from cover designs).
[Ferret 1988 cat., item 122 (£55).] 

1880s or 1890s

 
X.7.  Raphael Tuck & Sons (London). Helen Marion Burnside, Christmas
Lights
(1880s or 1890s). Printed in brown; front repeats cover
illustration. [Juvelis cat. 94-4 (1994), item 13 ($300).] 

Circa 1881

 
† X.8.  Routledge (New York). The Handy-Volume Shakespeare (ca. 1881).
13 vols. Green box, with printed label inside lid. [Leach sale (1984),
lot 37 ($10).] 

Circa 1885

       
X.9.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). [Dinah Maria Muloch], Miss Tommy
(ca. 1885). "Caxton Edition." Printed on front, spine, and back (ad
for "Best Editions of Caxton 12mos"). [Leach sale (1984), lot
67 ($5).] 
X.10.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). Doris: A Novel (ca. 1885). "Caxton
Edition." Printed on front, spine, and back (ad for "Caxton
12mos"). [Leach sale (1984), lot 68 (not sold).] 
X.11.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). Jane Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw (ca.
1885). Printed on front and spine (repeating cover). [Leach sale
(1984), lot 76 (not sold).] 
‡ X.12.  Dutton (New York). Henry W. Longfellow, The Day Is Done
(ca. 1885). Box, printed on front; jacket printed in dark brown on
front. [Leach sale (1984), lot 72 ($40).] 

Circa 1888

       
X.13.  Belford, Clarke (Chicago). Samuel W. Baker, Eight Years' Wanderings
in Ceylon
(ca. 1888). "Caxton Edition." Printed on front
and spine (repeating cover) and back (ad for "Caxton 12mos").
[Leach sale (1984), lot 98 (not sold).] 
X.14.  Conkey (Chicago). Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Maurine and Other Poems
(1888 or later). (1) Printed in brown on front and spine. (2) Printed
on front and spine (including drawings) and back panel and front
flap (ads); jacket has imprint of Albert Whitman (Chicago),
Conkey's distributor. [(1) Collection of G. T. Tanselle, 2005. (2) In
stock of Mac Donnell Rare Books, 2005.] 
X.15.  DeWolfe, Fiske (Boston). Charles Dickens, A Child's History of
England
(ca. 1888). Printed on front and spine (repeating cover)
and back (ad). [Leach sale (1984), lot 103 ($5).] 
X.16.  Dutton (New York). J. Denham Smith, F. Whitfield, et al., Resting:
A Selection of Verses
(ca. 1888). Printed on front (repeating cover
illustration). [Leach sale (1984), lot 113 (not sold).] 

131

Page 131

Circa 1890

                             
† X.17.  Art Lithograph Publishing Co. (New York). Isa J. Postgate, A
Flight into Fayland
(ca. 1890). Box with printed label. [Leach sale
(1984), lot 157 (not sold).] 
X.18.  Dana, Estes (Boston). Hezekiah Butterworth, A Zigzag Journey in
the Sunny South
(ca. 1890). Printed on front and spine (repeating
cover). [Leach sale (1984), lot 137 (not sold).] 
X.19.  Dana, Estes (Boston). Laura E. Richards, Melody (ca. 1890). Printed
on front (repeating cover) and spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 160
($5).] 
X.20.  DeWolfe, Fiske (Boston). Thomas DeQuincey, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
William Makepeace Thackeray, et al., Good Stories (ca.
1890). Printed on front and spine (repeating cover) and back (ad).
[Leach sale (1984), lot 145 (not sold).] 
‡ X.21.  Dutton (New York). Phillips Brooks, Poems (ca. 1890). Box printed
in gold; jacket printed in gold on front. [Leach sale (1984), lot 134
($10).] 
† X.22.  Dutton (New York). Evelyn Nesbit, The Lily and the Cross (ca.
1890). Box with printed label. [Leach sale (1984), lot 154 ($5).] 
X.23.  Dutton (New York). A Posy of Winter Roses (ca. 1890). Printed in
brown on front with floral decoration. [Leach sale (1984), lot 158
(not sold).] 
X.24.  Harper (New York). Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis (ca. 1890). Printed
on spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 141 ($22.50).] 
† X.25.  Illustrated Booklet Co. (Chicago). Life of Abraham Lincoln (ca.
1890). Box lettered in gold. [Leach sale (1984), lot 150 (not sold).] 
X.26.  Lee & Shepard (Boston). Nathaniel H. Bishop, Voyage of the Paper
Canoe
(ca. 1890). Printed on spine. [Leach sale (1984), lot 131 ($35).] 
X.27.  Lothrop, Lee & Shepard (Boston). Sarah K. Bolton, How Success Is
Won
(ca. 1890). Orange, printed on front and spine (repeating
cover). [Leach sale (1984), lot 133 ($7.50).] 
X.28.  Obpacher Bros. (Munich and New York). Jessie Chase, Resurrection
Gladness
(ca. 1890). Printed in brown on front with flower
ornament. [Leach sale (1984), lot 138 ($30).] 
¢ X.29.  Porter & Coates (Philadelphia). R. D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone
(ca. 1890). 20th edition. Cloth, printed in gold on spine. [In stock
of Mac Donnell Rare Books, 2005.] 
† X.30.  Frank S. Thayer (Denver). Gems of Colorado Scenery, ill. from
photographs by W. H. Jackson (ca. 1890). Box with label. [Leach
sale (1984), lot 144 ($60).] 
†¢X.31.  Winston (Philadelphia). R. D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone (ca. 1890).
2 vols. Box lettered in gold; cloth jackets printed on spine. [Leach
sale (1984), lot 132 ($10).] 
 
[1]

I use "dust-jacket" and "book-jacket" interchangeably; but I never use "wrapper"
for "jacket," reserving "wrapper" for paper covers that are attached to a book or pamphlet.

[2]

"Book-Jackets: Their Irresistible Rise," Matrix, 24 (2004), 122-127 (quotation from
p. 122). A book published shortly after my article could still refer to collectors throwing
jackets away: Philip Gaskell, in A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), says, "The
bibliographical importance of twentieth-century dust jackets is obvious enough, although
librarians (and, more surprisingly, book collectors) often throw them away" (pp. 249-250).
In his brief discussion of jackets, Gaskell states that, "with the exception of the paperback
revolution . . ., the most striking innovation in the presentation of books in the first half
of the twentieth century was the development of the dust-jacket as an advertising medium."
Perhaps the change that Alderson refers to is reflected in Geoffrey Ashall Glaister's Glossary
of the Book,
where the short entry on jackets, unillustrated in the first edition (1960), is
accompanied by a full page of illustrations in the second (1979).

[3]

One should therefore turn to the earlier article for references to most of the pre-1970
dust-jacket literature and for many other examples (besides those now provided) of jackets
that illustrate various points, as well as for observations not repeated here (such as suggestions
for describing jackets). The 1971 article was also accompanied by ten illustrations
(references to other published illustrations of early jackets and slip-cases are included in
the relevant entries in the list appended to the present article).