 | Studies in bibliography |  |
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),
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
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]
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]
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.)
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.
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).
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]).
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).
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.
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).
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).
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).
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).
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.
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.
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).
I reviewed six of them from the 1970s in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society
of America, 72 (1978), 265-281.
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).
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.")
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."
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."
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).
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.
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.)
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).
"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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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).
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.)
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