University of Virginia Library

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

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

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

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—

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

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.)

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

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

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.