University of Virginia Library

BOOK-JACKETS OF THE 1890s

by
G. Thomas Tanselle

The adoption of book-jackets by publishers in the English-speaking world
has produced what may be the most striking and durable change in the
appearance of their books since the introduction of cloth edition-casings in the
1820s.[1] For about forty years I have been interested in documenting the growth
in the use of book-jackets (and other detachable coverings of books) by publish-
ers and have made notes on every pre-1901 example that came to my attention.
I gave an initial report in The Library in 1971, to which I appended a list of 262
pre-1901 examples.[2] Thirty-five years later, in volume 56 of Studies in Bibliogra-
phy, I published a much fuller history of the book-jacket down to the present,
surveyed the attention that had been paid to jackets since 1971, reviewed their
uses as historical evidence, and offered a list of 380 examples of pre-1891 jackets
(superseding my earlier list for the years through 1890).[3] Now I am presenting
a new list for the decade of the 1890s (1891 through 1900), amounting to 1,156
entries, prefaced by a brief account of recent book-jacket news and a summary
of some of the information revealed by the 1890s list.

I

One of the concerns taken up in my recent article was the far too common
practice among dealers of moving jackets from one copy of a book to another;
and I commented on the discussions occasioned by the 2004 report of a subcom-
mittee of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association that criticized the practice and
insisted on dealers' noting any discrepancy in condition between a book and its
jacket (and identifying switched jackets when possible). A few months after the
London book-jacket conference for which my article was written, Nicolas Barker
published an admirable leader entitled "Sophistication" in the Spring 2006 num-
ber of The Book Collector (55: 11–27). Recognizing that certain alterations to a
book can sometimes be countenanced if conservation is necessary for the book's
survival, he was appropriately firm in declaring other intrusions, aimed at "res-

toration," to be unjustifiable tampering with historic artifacts—the "crime of
distorting historic fact" (p. 17).

One of his examples dealt with remboîtage (insertion of a book's text block
into a different binding) and the other with the supplying of jackets. Even when
dealers disclose what has been done, these practices are indefensible: as Barker
says, "Remboîtage is wrong, and doubly wrong if the fact is suppressed" (p.15).[4] In
the matter of jackets, he called for the national organizations that make up the
International League of Antiquarian Booksellers to adopt more explicit codes of
ethics, with provisions for sanctions to enforce them. To begin the process, he
offered his own Ten Commandments regarding jackets. The two central ones,
from which all else follows, are the first and fourth: "Thou shalt not have any
jacket but the original jacket"; "Remember that thou keep absolute the integrity
of jacket and book. Upon it thou shalt do no manner of change or exchange…."
Indeed, "no manner of change or exchange" is an elegant summary of the
position, for it covers both switching jackets and touching them up. Barker's
commandments should be memorized and held inviolable by all dealers and
collectors.

That this hope is vain was reflected in a depressing article that appeared a
year later in the May/June 2007 issue (No. 27) of Fine Books & Collections. Written
by the magazine's editor, P. Scott Brown, and ominously entitled "The Anatomy
of Dust Jacket Restoration" (pp. 40–45), it makes clear what a lucrative business
jacket restorers have, for the demand from prominent dealers exceeds the supply
of "expert" restorers. The practice of sophisticated (so to speak) jacket restora-
tion apparently began in the mid-1970s when Peter Howard (Serendipity Books,
Berkeley) proposed the idea to John Pofelski, whose job in the R. R. Donnelley
binding department was about to end, along with the department itself. Now
there is a small group of such specialists, whose work has affected thousands of
jackets in the stocks of dealers and the holdings of collectors and libraries. Some
dealers are willing to invest in such restoration in order, obviously, "to make
more money" (in Howard's words). Brown even says, with a curious logic, "The
jacket restoration trend has had the beneficial effect of bringing a lot of books
into circulation that would not have been salable or collectable" (p. 45).

The only reason that books in restored (or switched) jackets are "salable"
at high prices is that there is considerable demand for them on the part of
collectors—which in turn means that there are many collectors who need to be
educated in the matter of historic preservation. One of the finest traditions of the
book world is the role that dealers have played as the teachers of collectors. But
in this matter, a few prominent dealers have forgotten that the product they are
selling is historical evidence, and they have violated collectors' trust by support-
ing the alteration of that evidence (even when they have disclosed it). Brown's
article makes this incredible assertion: "To restore or not to restore? … In large

measure, it comes down to personal preference" (p.45). How can the commission
of crimes against the integrity of historical documentation be so easily dismissed
as "personal preference"? To condone the alteration of artifacts for cosmetic
reasons is to rob collecting of meaning as a serious intellectual pursuit.

The market for twentieth-century jackets, which supports the restoration
business, remains strong. Just how strong is illustrated by the fact that Bonham's
auction house, in the catalogue for its 10 June 2009 sale in New York, placed an
estimate of $80,000-$120,000 on Maurice Goldstone's copy of the first printing
of The Great Gatsby in a slightly frayed jacket (whereas a copy without the jacket
was estimated at $1500–$2500). The price actually fetched by the jacketed copy
was $182,000, and the unjacketed copy brought $3,660 (both figures inclusive of
the buyer's premium). Another aspect of the interest in twentieth-century jackets
is the continuing production of books on the art of paperback-cover and jacket
design: recent examples are Kevin Johnson's The Dark Page: Books That Inspired
American Film Noir (1940–1949) (2007);[5] Bond Bound 007: Ian Fleming and the Art of
Cover Design, edited by Selina Skipwith (2008); and David M. Earle's Re-Covering
Modernism (2009).[6]

The role of the book trade in the history of the study and appreciation of
jackets was a major strand of my recent article. In connection with early jackets,
the name of Ken Leach, a Brattleboro (Vermont) dealer, loomed large in the
article because of the major collection of American pre-1901 jackets that he
formed in the 1970s and sold at auction in 1984 (608 lots). His death in 2007
deserves to be recorded here, as well as the fact that Marcus McCorison wrote a
long obituary of him.[7] McCorison devotes a paragraph to the unsuccessful 1984
auction, noting that "Leach was bitterly disappointed by what he considered the
obtuseness of collectors and librarians who, failing to recognize the significance
of book coverings to bibliographic inquiry, did not take advantage of his offer-
ing." As McCorison says, "The sale may have been held before its time." The
results would clearly be far different today.

Since my latest article, two dealers have become particularly active in the
study and collecting of early jackets: Mark Godburn (The Bookmark, North
Canaan, Connecticut) and Tom Congalton (Between the Covers Rare Books,
Gloucester City, New Jersey). In 2008 Godburn established a website entitled
"Nineteenth Century Dust Jackets: An Illustrated History" (http://nineteenth-
centurydustjackets.com), which announced his plans for writing such a history,
offered a "picture gallery" of early jackets, and encouraged people to report
information about book-jacket history and to send images of jackets they have
access to. In October 2009 he changed the site to one that accommodates blog-

ging (http://earlydustjackets.blogspot.com/). Although the new site has fewer
illustrations of jackets, it originally had a longer text, which excerpted the preface
to his forthcoming book and quoted Lewis Carroll's letter of 6 February 1876
to Macmillan discussing the jacket for The Hunting of the Snark. This site could
become a useful clearinghouse.[8] Godburn has been buying many of the pre-1901
jackets that have come to his attention, as has Congalton, whose more extensive
collection now incorporates the assemblages formed by two other dealers. Ap-
parently Congalton has not yet amassed as many jackets as Leach did, but he is
well on his way. The efforts of these two dealers will significantly contribute to
the future study of book-jacket history.

II

It is not surprising that far more English and American book-jackets survive
from the 1890s than from any earlier decade, simply because those years are
nearer to the present: presumably many more could be located from the first
and second decades of the twentieth century, if anyone were trying to do so.
One might instead have thought that the quantity of survivals from the 1890s
indicates that the custom of using jackets had by then become more widespread
among publishers than it was earlier; but the nature of the survivals from the
1870s and 1880s, if not their number, makes that conclusion seem unlikely.
The use of jackets was a well-established publishing practice many years before
the 1890s began.[9]

The relatively large number of survivals from the 1890s, however, does make
possible more detailed comments and more reliable generalizations than can be
made for earlier decades. My list shows, for example, that the major publishers in
both Britain and America used jackets regularly throughout the 1890s, and some
publishers are represented by large numbers of survivals. Although chance inevi-
tably determines to some extent which jackets have survived and which of them
I have learned about, the numbers are obviously also influenced by the extent
of each publisher's output and the number of copies printed. Two of the largest
American publishers of the time, Harper in New York and Houghton Mifflin in
Boston, are each represented by well over a hundred examples from the 1890s.[10]
There are from three to four dozen from such other prominent New York firms as
Appleton, Century, Crowell, Dodd Mead, and Scribner, and from Little, Brown
in Boston; and Macmillan and Putnam follow with about two dozen.

Many publishers of the second rank, from a literary point of view, brought
out widely popular books and extensive reprint series, and these publishers also
put jackets on their books, as the numerous examples from such firms as Henry

Altemus, A. L. Burt, H. M. Caldwell, Estes & Lauriat, Lee & Shepard, and L. C.
Page show. And there are surviving jackets (if fewer in number) from many other
well-known firms from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. But to il-
lustrate the pervasiveness of jackets, one needs also to look at small firms located
outside the major publishing centers. Flood & Vincent of Meadville, Pennsylva-
nia, for instance, placed a jacket on Virna Woods's The Amazons (91.19),[11] as Dar-
ling & Co. of Keene, New Hampshire, did on Anna J. Granniss's Sandwort and
Skipped Stitches (98.21–22), and as Helman-Taylor of Cleveland did on Ludovico
Cornaro's A Treatise on Temperance and Sobriety (98.52). The same point is made
by the presence of jackets on privately printed or self-published books, such as
A. I. Root's The ABC of Bee Culture (91.58, Medina, Ohio), M. A. Hunt's How to
Grow Cut Flowers (93.59, Terre Haute, Ind.), William D. Armes's bibliography of
George Meredith (98.95, Berkeley), and Bradford Peck's The World a Department
Store (1900.119, Lewiston, Me.).

The situation was not different in Britain, though the number of examples I
have recorded is far fewer: only thirteen percent of the entries in my list represent
British publishers. This fact should not, however, be taken to mean that the cus-
tom of using jackets was less common in England and Scotland; all it signifies is
that I have had more opportunities for locating American jackets. My confidence
on this point derives from the general pattern that emerges. Thus two major
publishers—Macmillan and Longmans, Green—are especially well represented,
with examples stretching throughout the decade. Other leading publishers (such
as Bell, Adam & Charles Black, Blackie, Dent, Heinemann, Murray, Kegan Paul,
and Unwin) are present with examples from different parts of the decade; John
Lane, who could only appear in the second half of the decade (after his break with
Elkin Mathews in 1894), is represented by eleven examples from 1896 through
1900. Still others (including such notable names as Chatto & Windus, Sampson
Low, Grant Richards, Routledge, and Warne) are also here, but with one or
two entries each. Examples from outside London range from well-known firms
such as Blackwood of Edinburgh and MacLehose & Sons of Glasgow to David
Bryce (Glasgow) and Eneas Mackay (Stirling), as well as a private printing for
G. Moreton (Seal Chart, near Sevenoaks).

The generalizations that can be made about the physical appearance of jack-
ets in the 1890s apply to those produced on both sides of the Atlantic. Jackets
from any location vary among themselves, of course, but the differences (as to
which surfaces are printed and what is printed on them, for example) exist both
within Britain and within America.[12] During this period, jackets had not yet sup-
planted bindings as the place where designers and artists were asked to concen-
trate their efforts. The decade of the nineties was at the heart of the great period
of edition-binding designs, and the jackets were meant simply to protect the bind-

ings and not normally to be objects of artistic interest in their own right. When
decorations or illustrations do appear on them, they are almost always repeated
from the binding: designs were not specially commissioned for the jackets. It is
not surprising that jackets at this time were still thought of as protective cover-
ings, or that the idea of letting jacket designs supplant binding designs did not
emerge instantly. But what is surprising is how sporadically the backs and flaps
of jackets were taken advantage of for advertising.

The most common style of jacket in the 1890s had printing on the spine and
(often) on the front, with all the other surfaces blank. The paper was usually
cream, gray, or tan, with printing in black or brown (or sometimes another color).
What was printed on the spine was the title and the author's and publisher's
names, and the front carried the title and the author's name, all usually repro-
duced from the binding. But occasionally both surfaces had additional printing.
The price, for example, sometimes appeared on the spine, probably more often
in England than in America: English examples come from Black (92.4), Macmil-
lan (92.56), Chatto & Windus (94.20), Unwin (95.102), Lane (96.73), Heinemann
(98.51, 1900.61), and Simpkin, Marshall (1900.132); American ones come from
Harper (93.50, 97.51, 99.52, 99.54–55) and Doubleday, Page (1900.45).[13] The
year might also be given on the spine, though apparently with less frequency, as
in examples from the London firms of John C. Nimmo (97.98) and Longmans,
Green (98.77). Occasionally, in a practice that began earlier and continued well
into the twentieth century, an indication of the number of copies sold was also
printed on the spine (see the Hutchinson example with "Sixteenth Thousand"
on the spine [94.62]).

The price and date also occurred, in rare instances, on the front panel: ex-
amples of the former come from Macmillan of London (97.92) and Baker &
Taylor (99.9); of the latter from the British firms Kegan Paul (93.83), MacLehose
(97.90), and Bell (98.6). Although the dominant style of the front panel was very
plain (when printed at all), there is no shortage of examples of jackets with fronts
that contain designs or illustrations taken from the book covers, though printed
in fewer colors or a single one. When a binding was designed by a well-known
designer, or when it reproduced from within the book a picture by a prominent
illustrator, the jacket that repeated such a binding or illustration became a sepa-
rate object displaying the work of a famous artist (though apparently not saved
as such any more than unembellished jackets were). Among the artists for whom
such examples survive are Helen Maitland Armstrong (99.121), Margaret Arm-
strong (99.120, 1900.41), Walter Crane (98.39), W. W. Denslow (99.58), George
Wharton Edwards (98.35), Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (93.101), Laurence
Housman (93.76, with his initials on the back; 94.73), E. W. Kemble (93.13),
Frederic Remington (92.48), Bruce Rogers (97.108), Amy Sacker (99.80), Ernest
Seton Thompson (99.3), Elihu Vedder (94.54), Gleeson White (97.55), and Sarah
Wyman Whitman (97.58), as well as the Decorative Designers (98.80, 1900.89).
The idea of reusing decorative elements present on bindings apparently stemmed

from a recognition that the simple, drab jackets did nothing to attract book-
buyers. Although booksellers undoubtedly removed the jackets from a few copies
of certain books for display, the repetition of binding decoration on jackets served
in every case to draw attention to the book and suggest something of the splendor
that often lay beneath the jacket.[14]

In some instances, instead of repeating the covers, the jacket fronts reprinted
the title pages (91.10–12, Dutton; 91.38, Little, Brown; 94.86, Roberts Brothers;
97.99, Nister). Blurbs did show up on jacket fronts, especially late in the decade,
though with far less frequency than in the twentieth century. Several Harper ex-
amples are known (96.46, 97.51, 99.49–50, 99.52, 99.54; also Harper of London,
1900.52); the practice was also employed by (among others) Dodd, Mead (99.36,
99.38), Doubleday (97.41, 99.41, 99.43, 1900.46), Houghton Mifflin (95.53), Lit-
tle, Brown (98.75, where reviews are quoted; 1900.87), and Revell (99.113). Even
advertising for other books could appear on the fronts of jackets, but this practice
was probably limited primarily to books in series, with the advertisement relating
to the whole series (as in a Little, Brown example, 98.74).

The backs and flaps of jackets, though usually blank in the 1890s, were nev-
ertheless used for advertising in a considerable number of instances. The backs
were seized for this purpose before the flaps were, and there are dozens of ex-
amples of advertising on jacket backs throughout the decade. Sometimes there
was a list of books by the same author as the book covered by the jacket (92.46,
Lee & Shepard); sometimes a related book was publicized, as when Lew Wallace's
The Prince of India was praised on the back of the jacket for a book about the
illustrations in Ben-Hur (93.52, Harper); and at other times a different author's
books were advertised, as when the jacket for George Du Maurier's The Martian
(98.37) advertises Thomas Hardy's novels on the back, or the one for a book by
the critic Harry Thurston Peck (98.48) advertises the "New Library Editions" of
Mark Twain, or the one for Stephen Crane's Whilomville Stories (1900.53) adver-
tises titles by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.[15] The last four mentioned are Harper
books, but there was no uniformity in Harper practice: the backs were frequently
blank or displayed only the publisher's device (92.25, 92.27, 93.33). (Another
nearly blank style of back—with only the price printed there—appeared on a
Dent book [93.21].) Although advertising on backs was usually for books, it oc-
casionally dealt with other products, as when Rhodes & McClure used that space
to advertise the "Audiphone for the Deaf" (98.101, 99.15) or when Little, Brown
placed an advertisement for a meat company on the back of the jacket for Mrs.
Lincoln's Boston Cook Book (99.89). Illustrations might also appear on backs (96.16,
Appleton; 98.73, 99.88, Little, Brown, both on Lafcadio Hearn titles), and blurbs
as well (99.51, 1900.60, Harper; 1900.132, Simpkin, Marshall; 1900.134, Stokes).

Although the use of jacket flaps for advertising was not infrequent throughout
the decade, it was not as common as the placement of ads on backs. Sometimes
there was printing only on the back flap (96.31, Crowell; 97.96, Mansfield) or
only on the front flap (93.16, 97.31, Crowell; 96.92, Macmillan of New York;
97.123, Vir; 1900.89, Little, Brown). There was a series of Little, Brown jackets
in which ads appeared on the front flap, even though there was no printing on
either the back flap or the back panel (97.83, 98.75, 1900.87, 1900.93). More
often, when the flaps were printed at all, both flaps were used (examples are
93.67, Lippincott; 93.91, Scott; 94.22, 97.34, Crowell; 94.62, Hutchinson; 94.64,
Knight; 94.75, Macmillan of New York; 98.35, Funk & Wagnalls; 98.80, Long-
mans, Green; 99.113, 1900.127, Revell; 1900.39, Dillingham). (These examples
again illustrate how a single firm followed varying patterns: Crowell is cited for
using the front flap alone in 1893 and 1897, the back flap alone in 1896, and both
flaps in 1894 and 1897.) In one Revell example, the advertisements on the flaps
took the form of illustrations of books (91.53). On rare occasions, the front flap
carried text other than advertising: Harper is known to have placed instructions
on "How to Open a Book" on the front flap (98.40); and the price sometimes ap-
peared there, as in examples from three Boston firms (94.2, Arena; 94.67, Lee &
Shepard; 99.10, Beacon Press).

Books in series—and there were a great many publishers' series in the
1890s—form a special category because the urge to call attention to all the titles
in a series led to jackets covered on all surfaces with listings and series numbers
(useful to later scholars, of course, for publishing history). Particularly in the
case of reprint series, there was often a single all-purpose jacket to be used on
every volume in the series; they often carried the series binding design on their
fronts but were otherwise filled with enumerations of titles in small type. The
busy surfaces produced a very different look from the uncluttered style prevalent
on jackets for other books. These generic jackets thus did not indicate the title
or author of the particular book enclosed by the jacket (1900.43, an example of
Donohue's "Vassar Series"). One solution to this problem is illustrated by an
English example of a single-author series, the works of G. A. Henty published
by Blackie: a printed label with the individual title was stuck on the spine of the
jacket (92.6). A circular hole in the spine was another solution, but not limited
to books in series (X.57, Macmillan of London, ca. 1896; 97.53, Heinemann).
Generic jackets were not the universal rule for series, however; separate printings
that identified the individual book within the jacket and gave its series number
were also produced, with these two pieces of information either on the front
(98.101, Rhodes & McClure; 1900.2, Altemus) or on the spine (X.64, Altemus,
ca. 1898). Some Altemus jackets were typical in having fronts, backs, and flaps
all covered with ads for various series (96.1, 96.3–4); but the need for additional
space to list all the titles in one or more series meant that the inside of the jacket
(the surface touching the book) was not ignored, as in the jackets for Porter &
Coates's "Alta" series (X.47–48, ca. 1895)—a practice that was regularly used in
the twentieth century for extensive series such as "The Modern Library."[16]

It is clear that publishers did not have a standard jacket style that they fol-
lowed consistently, but a further kind of variation was the one between copies of
jackets for a single title. The fact that variant jackets from the 1890s exist (and
once existed more profusely) should not be unexpected, for they could have re-
sulted from at least two kinds of likely situations. One is that a new printing of
a book called for a new supply of jackets as well; and the new jackets might be
made of a different color of paper, or have printing of a different color, or carry
printing on a previously blank surface (or vice versa). Detecting specific print-
ings of nineteenth-century books is notoriously difficult (since often there is no
obvious clue on the title or copyright page), and the existence of variant jackets
should give bibliographers additional incentive to examine the books closely for
signs of reprinting. (Although one can never be certain that the jacket presently
on a book was always there, dealers have had little opportunity to switch jackets
on nineteenth-century books because of the rarity of surviving jackets.) Alterna-
tively, variant jackets may well be found on copies of the same printing of a book,
if jackets were produced in batches smaller than the total number of copies of the
book—as was frequently the situation with the bindings themselves.

Which of these explanations accounts for each of the variant jackets in my
list has not been determined. There are variations in the color of the printing
(91.60, Saalfield & Fitch; 99.34, Dana, Estes), in the color of the paper (92.63,
Kegan Paul), and in the text, as in an example from Little, Brown (91.38) where
one version of the front repeats the title page in red and black, while the other
partially repeats the cover in green. Two books that have been of interest to
collectors illustrate variations in the choice of jacket surfaces to be printed: the
jacket for James Whitcomb Riley's The Flying Islands of the Night (92.7, Bowen-
Merrill) can have a blank or a printed spine; that for Ambrose Bierce's Fantastic
Fables (99.106, Putnam) can have a blank or a printed front flap.

Two kinds of detachable coverings common in the 1890s that do not fore-
shadow twentieth-century practice are cloth jackets and boxes with lids.[17] Cloth
jackets could be thin when made of cloth only (91.43, McClurg; 92.65, pri-
vately printed), but they were generally made of cloth backed with stiff paper.
They were used primarily for fancy gift editions of two-volume travel accounts
or standard texts, which usually contained illustrations and had elaborate bind-
ings with gilt much in evidence. For additional protection and greater luxurious-
ness, the books were also supplied with boxes. Such jackets, often red, blue, or
green, normally had blank surfaces except for the title and author's name in gold
(sometimes black) on the spines. In rare instances, there might be a printed paper
label on the spine (96.51, Houghton Mifflin). Printing on cloth-jacket fronts did
sometimes occur (1900.59, Harper), and there are even instances of cover illus-
trations being repeated (93.54, Houghton Mifflin; 98.107, Russell). More than
one color of cloth jacket might be used for a given book (1900.26, Coates)—a

practice reminiscent of the treatment of cloth bindings earlier in the century,
when different colors were often available simultaneously, though it may simply
mean that the jackets were produced at different times.

Boxes took several forms in addition to the slip-case (with an open side where
the spines are), which became the dominant style in the twentieth century. Even
boxes in slip-case form were frequently not meant to stand with the open (spine)
side perpendicular to the shelf but rather with the open side on top (so that the
books—usually there were two jacketed books—rested on their fore-edges). The
red cloth-covered box for Hawthorne's The Marble Faun in two illustrated vol-
umes (95.52, Houghton Mifflin), for example, has printing in gold on one end (in-
cluding the title and the author's and publisher's names), with the words running
parallel to the shorter dimension and right-side-up when the box is standing with
the open side on top. (The bottom of the box, where the fore-edges of the book
rest, rather than being covered with cloth like the other surfaces, has a piece of
plain white paper pasted on it.) Another similar red-cloth box with gold lettering
on one end was produced by Coates for Edmondo de Amicis's two-volume Spain
and the Spaniards (95.17).

A Harper example, for Lew Wallace's two-volume The Prince of India (93.53),
follows the same model, except that the box is covered with white paper and
the lettering on the end is on an affixed label. Three examples of two-volume
sets from Macmillan (New York) illustrate the same form, with boxes of paper-
covered cardboard, but in these instances the printing (which includes the price)
is on one of the two large sides, again running parallel to the open side and set
to be read when the open side is on top (94.76, 95.75, 97.94). Another style was
identical to these in every way except that there was a removable lid to cover
the top (spine) side. Doubleday & McClure's two-volume set of Kipling's From
Sea to Sea (99.42) came out in a dark green paper-covered box and lid, with a
printed label on one end and a plain tan paper bottom. Another style of box for
two-volume works is illustrated by the box that Roberts Brothers produced for
Emily Dickinson's Letters (94.85): the opening is on one end, and the label (in
this case a leather label printed in gold) is on one of the two narrower sides, thus
resembling a spine label.

Boxes for larger sets of books (more than two volumes), a feature of earlier
decades, continued to appear in the 1890s. Examples devoted to single authors
are the Mershon Company's publication (after 1893) of six of Edna Lyall's nov-
els, packed fore-edge down in a paper-covered box with a detachable lid and
a printed label on one end (X.39); George Allen's six-volume Faerie Queene in a
blue-cloth-covered box with a hinged lid printed in gold on its front edge (97.2);
and Crowell's twelve-volume set of Browning in a red-cloth-covered wooden
box, printed in gold on the front and with a printed label inside the top (98.16).
Shakespeare was a natural for this kind of treatment, and two known examples
from about 1895 are a 24-volume set in a black leather box (X.43, Knickerbocker
Leather & Novelty Co.) and a thirteen-volume set in a red cloth box (X.46,
McKay). As for multi-author series, Scribner placed its ten-volume sets of "Sto-
ries by American Authors" (94.88) and "Stories by English Authors" (99.124) in
boxes with printed labels, as did Curtis for its "Ladies' Home Journal Library of

Fiction" (99.33) and Houghton Mifflin for its "Little Classics" (99.68). Boxes for
books in series often had hinged lids, like "The Christian Herald Library" in ten
volumes (95.7, Bible House), with gold lettering on the lid.[18]

An altogether different kind of box was frequently used for single-volume gift
editions: a shallow box, in which the book lies flat, with a removable lid (often
with a printed label on the top or the edge of the lid). Such boxes were commonly
used for small, heavily illustrated, volumes of poetry, such as Joseph Knight's
Songs from the Great Poets (92.43); but they were used for other kinds of books as
well, such as R. H. Russell's "Maude Adams Edition" of J. M. Barrie's The Little
Minister (99.118). A rare example of a box tailored to the subject matter is the
one H. M. Caldwell produced for John Bain's Tobacco in Song and Story (99.15): it
resembles a cigar box and has lithographed labels on top.[19]

In 1972 Matthew J. Bruccoli said, "The Red Badge of Courage [1895] appears to
be the first great American novel issued with a dust jacket."[20] A less controversial
way of approaching the subject of jacketed books by prominent authors of the
nineteenth century would be to say simply that first editions by a number of great
or significant writers appeared in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and
that all (or nearly all) of them were probably covered with jackets when published.
Because of the rarity of jackets from this period, however, few collectors have
been able to find them. Bruccoli's own Crane collection, sold at auction in 1974,
contained jacketed copies of three Appleton titles (with jackets printed on fronts
and spines only), The Red Badge of Courage (95.2), The Little Regiment (96.8), and The
Third Violet (97.8), as well as The Open Boat (98.31, Doubleday & McClure) and
Active Service (99.131, Stokes). David J. Supino, in his collection of Henry James,
has at least six nineteenth-century James jackets, going back to French Poets and
Novelists (Macmillan of London, 1878); the other five are from the 1890s, four of
them American, printed on the spines only (93.46, 94.41, 95.43, Harper; 99.67,
Houghton Mifflin), and one English, printed on the front and spine (1900.61,
Heinemann). In his impressively detailed record of his collection, Henry James:
A Bibliographical Catalogue of a Collection of Editions to 1921 (2006), Supino pays
careful attention to jackets and illustrates the 1878 one. Another collector who
has described his collection in print and discussed the jackets it contains is Kevin

Mac Donnell; his 1998 article in Firsts on "Collecting Mark Twain" (8.7/8 [July/
August], 24–61) provides photographs of the Harper jackets for How to Tell a
Story (97.52) and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900.58). (My 1890s list
records eight items for Crane, eight for James, and six for Twain.)

This select group of American authors must also include Emily Dickinson,
some of whose work was appearing posthumously in the 1890s (three jacketed
examples are in my list), and William Dean Howells, who is represented in my
list with fifteen titles (many of them brought out by Harper). But there are many
other significant American writers who were publishing in the 1890s and for whom
multiple examples of jacketed books from that period are known to survive. They
include Thomas Bailey Aldrich, John Kendrick Bangs, John Burroughs, Finley
Peter Dunne, Eugene Field, John Fiske, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Joel Chandler
Harris, Lafcadio Hearn, Sarah Orne Jewett, Thomas Nelson Page, and Laura E.
Richards. Among English authors there are Austin Dobson, Arthur Conan Doyle,
Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Andrew Lang, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
(Other important names from both countries appear in my list, represented by
only one or two entries.) Not surprisingly, a considerable number of first editions
by popular novelists of the day, as well as reprints of perennially favorite writers,
survive in jackets. The first category includes F. Marion Crawford, Richard Har-
ding Davis, Paul Leicester Ford, S. Weir Mitchell, F. Hopkinson Smith, and Lew
Wallace; the second, Alcott, Blackmore, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, Drummond,
Hawthorne, Holmes, Irving, Longfellow, Lowell, and Scott.

The publication of complete sets of authors' works was not uncommon in the
1890s, and presumably most of them appeared in jackets, even though I have so
far located fewer than a dozen examples of jacketed sets. Since sets often went
unread, one might at first expect a high rate of survival for their jackets, and in-
deed more are sure to turn up. But since for much of the twentieth century sets
were not a very salable commodity in used-book stores, becoming almost per-
manent residents of dealers' shelves, it is likely that many dealers discarded the
increasingly soiled and frayed jackets to improve the appearance of the sets. In
any case, three English publishers are known (from my list) to have used jackets
on their sets: John C. Nimmo on a 48-volume Scott (92.59); Osgood, McIlvaine
on a 16-volume Hardy (95.83); and Chapman & Hall on a 34-volume Dickens
(97.22). The Scott came out in both a large-paper and a small-paper form, with
different jackets: the large-paper had printing only on the spines, the small-paper
on the fronts as well as the spines. In America, the Philadelphia office of Reuwee,
Wattley & Walch undertook a 26-volume edition of Ruskin and placed on each
volume a blue cloth jacket with a printed paper label on the spine (91.52). Harper
also used cloth jackets on its set of Motley (1900.55). The Riverside Press added
a touch of luxury to its set of Holmes by making jackets that had extra flaps at
the top and bottom, so that each board of the book was covered on all three of
its outer edges (91.55). Evidence of jackets also exists for Houghton Mifflin's sets
of Stowe (96.64), Lowell (99.71), and Burroughs (1900.65) and Scribner's set of
Eugene Field (96.115).

Many of these observations about book-jackets and publishers' boxes in the
1890s are very probably applicable to the preceding ten or fifteen years as well.
But the richer evidence available for the 1890s, even though it still reflects only

a tiny fraction of all the jacketed books that were published,[21] allows a more de-
tailed picture to be constructed, and with greater confidence. Clearly there was
no uniformity in the treatment of jacket surfaces, not even within individual pub-
lishing firms. But by the end of the decade the use of jacket fronts as a place for
decoration or illustration (if only from the binding) and of jacket backs and flaps
as spaces for advertising was well established (if not always practiced), and blurbs
were appearing with greater frequency. Other, very occasional, foreshadowings
of twentieth-century jackets were the inclusion of a photograph of the author
(98.76)[22] and the use of a decoration not on the cover of the book (91.60) or an
illustration not inside the book (92.48, 99.47, X.81).[23] No one would mistake any
of the 1890s jackets for twentieth-century ones; but the elements were all there,
ready for rapid development as the jacket became a new focus for graphic design,
replacing the binding in this regard. The stage was set for the explosion of jacket
art in the 1910s and the establishment of a pattern of jacket layout that has been
followed ever since.