 | Studies in bibliography |  |
II
When we turn to the role that dealers have played in the dust-jacket
story, pride of place goes to Ken Leach of Brattleboro, Vermont, who in
the 1970s and early 1980s assembled, and then dispersed, the largest
collection of pre-1901 jackets that has ever been formed (that is, since
the days when they were current). In the first of his 1977 catalogues
(77-1), he announced, "I am trying to build a collection of American
books in their original DUST JACKETS published prior to 1900."
After mentioning his two earliest (a printed envelope of 1848 and a
like very much to hear about. Or if you have any information about any
early ones I would like to hear about." By 6 February 1979, about two
years later, he had accumulated 212 examples, and in a letter to me
(enclosing a list of them) he said, "I am beginning to suspect that probably
at least 90% of all books published after 1890 were issued in dust
jackets"—a statement he publicly altered the next year by changing the
date to "1880" in a letter he published in AB Bookman's Weekly. The
purpose of his letter was to correct some errors in Adeline R. Tintner's
article "Henry James Writes His Own Blurbs": he noted that decorative
jackets appeared at least as early as 1878 (not 1902) and blurbs as early
as 1880 (not 1906), citing examples. But he acknowledged that information
of this kind was not readily available: "There are probably," he
said, "not more than two or three actual collections in the world. But I
can walk upstairs to my `collection room' and inspect the shelves that
contain over 270 American books printed prior to 1900 in their original
Dust Jackets."[38]
A little more than a year later, in the fourth of his 1981 catalogues
(81-4), Leach offered his whole collection, then numbering "over" 440
items, for sale as a lot for $21,500 (item 82). In his description, he called
it (accurately) "the largest extant collection of its kind in the world,"
noted that it "had been about ten years in the building," and gave a correct
idea of the "enormous amount of information contained in and on
these jackets; the salesmanship (or lack of) of the publishers, the artists
involved, the advertisement information, the decorations, etc, etc." He
also astutely pointed out that the lot was "two collections in one": since
the jackets had protected the bindings, it was also a collection of pristine
examples of late nineteenth-century publishers' bindings. Despite these
valid points and a listing of some high spots,[39]
the collection did not sell,
and Leach wrote to me a year later (on 2 November 1982) asking for suggestions
of possible purchasers. By that time, there were about 550 items,
and the price was $26,000.
Another year and a half passed, with no more success in placing the
collection en bloc, and Leach decided to sell it at auction. On Sunday,
Oinonen Book Auctions (of Sunderland, Massachusetts) offered as Sale
No. 71 The Ken Leach Collection of Nineteenth Century American
Books in Original Dust Jackets and Boxes. The sixty-page catalogue
contains 608 lots arranged chronologically (and alphabetically by author
within each year), with an author index. Since each entry includes some
description of the binding and of the jacket (or box) and the name of
the publisher, the catalogue is a useful reference tool, as Leach had
hoped. In his introduction he says that the catalogue, which will "preserve
a record of the collection as a whole," "should continue to provide
a valuable sign-post for collectors." Another of his aims in selling at
auction—"to establish a price guide for each individual item"—was more
ambiguously realized, however, for a third of the lots failed to sell, even
at the minimum bid of $5 (they were simply given to the successful
bidder for the next lot sold), and books that were of little interest aside
from their jackets fetched low prices (139 of them brought $5 apiece).[40]
Thus the idea of buying jackets primarily to document their history was
not much in evidence in the saleroom, despite the example set by Leach
himself.
At the beginning of the auction, the entire collection was once more
offered as a whole, with a reserve of $25,000, as stipulated in the catalogue,
but there were no bidders. In the end, the sale realized a total of
$18,632.50—an average of $46.58 for the four hundred lots that sold (or
$26.29 if one eliminates the eleven items that brought more than $300).
The highest price by far, $3400, was fetched by Norris's McTeague
(1899), the other top prices being only in three figures: $700 for Stevenson
and Osbourne's The Ebb-Tide of 1894 (the only Stone & Kimball
jacket known); $600 for F. O. C. Darley's Six Illustrations of Rip Van
Winkle of 1848 (in a printed envelope); $575 for Muir's two-volume
Picturesque California of 1888 (in unprinted buckram jackets); $400 for
the 1877 edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illustrated by
Gustave Doré; $380 for Abraham Cahan's Yekl (1896); $310 for Remington's
Crooked Trails (1898); and $350-$440 for three Stephen Crane
titles, The Little Regiment (1896). The Third Violet (1897), and The
Monster (1899). The only other price that was over $300—the second
highest one, in fact, at $900—was for the only lot (no. 31) that did not
contain a detachable covering: an album (dated as "collected circa 18811895")
of some 250 "original printed proofs of illustrated covers and
dust jackets" from the New York firm of A. Hilgenreiner, produced
largely for the Century and Scribner publishing firms.
The earliest item in the sale was the Darley Six Illustrations (1848),
labeled "The earliest recorded American dust jacket" but more accurately
described (in Leach's words from his note in catalogue 77-1) as a
"printed envelope." The next five lots, from 1851 through 1870, were
books in publishers' slip-cases, not jackets. The earliest jackets in the
collection were from 1875, represented by three volumes in Scribner's
"Bric-a-Brac Series," and only thirteen more lots were for books dated
before 1880—including a presentation copy of the first volume of Charles
B. Turrill's California Notes (1876), published by the celebrated Edward
Bosqui (Leach called this lot "The first California dust jacket?",
but it brought only $110). From 1880 on, the rapidly increasing number
of lots per year reflected the relative availability of such jackets in general:
figures ranged from six for 1880 to twenty for 1888, with the total
for the 1880-89 period coming to 108. Thus of the 608 lots in the sale,
all but 128 dated from 1890 or later (the number from 1899 alone was
seventy). The catalogue therefore offers a good basis for making generalizations
about the widespread use of jackets in America in the 1890s.
But the range of features represented even in the relatively few pre-1890
examples is considerable. Leach's introduction, for instance, mentions
the earliest use of color printing in the collection as from 1878 (for
Bryant's The Flood of Years) and the earliest blurbs as from 1880 (for
Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village). And the geographical spread before
the early 1880s includes San Francisco, Richmond, Toronto, and
Chicago, in addition to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Useful as
the catalogue is, however, it does not come close to having the research
value of the collection itself; the dispersal of so large a group of nine-teenth-century
American jackets is indeed a setback for the study of this
aspect of publishing history. Nevertheless, Leach's attentiveness to jackets
was a notable contribution to the growing recognition of their historical
value, which is a prerequisite to their preservation.
Another dealer that has offered an unusual number of early jackets
(though far fewer than Leach) is Wilder Books of Elmhurst, Illinois.
In catalogue 9 (1984), for example, there were five nineteenth-century
books in jackets,[41]
all important but assigned prices that were high for
the time (especially in light of those realized at the Leach sale the same
year): Kate Greenaway's A Day in a Child's Life (1881), $850, and her
Almanack for 1891, $675; Poe's Lenore (illustrated, 1886), $1750; Henry
Demarest Lloyd's Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), $1250; and
Hardy's Wessex Poems (1898), $3500. The following year, catalogue 15
1880-1900" (three of which were unprinted). All five from catalogue
9 reappeared here, and except for Wessex Poems they were listed at
sharply reduced prices (the Lloyd, for instance, had dropped to $450).
Twelve of the items were from the Leach sale, where none had sold for
more than $100; their prices now ranged from $100 to $500 (Bellamy's
Equality of 1897, for example, had gone up from $80 to $500).[42] Two
years later Wilder's List 87-A, consisting of sixty items, was entitled
Books in Their Rare Original Dust Jackets, 1881-1915. Half the items
predated 1901, but fourteen of them were brought forward from catalogue
15 (many at considerably reduced prices),[43] and four came from
the Leach sale; of those not previously listed, the most significant were
E. W. Waterhouse's The Island of Anarchy (1887), known to science-fiction
collectors, and Henry Blake Fuller's The Cliff Dwellers (1893),
priced at $685 and $1025, respectively.
The Wilder firm's continuing interest in jackets was further shown
eight years later with its catalogue 72 (1995), entitled Books in Rare
Original Dust Jackets, 1882-1923, though the proportion of pre-1901
printed jackets had declined to twenty out of fifty-three items. Of those,
three still remained from the 1987 list, and two (not listed there) had
been in the Leach sale. Notable jackets from the early years of the
twentieth century should not be overlooked, such as the 1910 jacket
reproducing Will Bradley's cover design for Walt Mason's Uncle Walt
($150), the 1910 jacket with a color illustration by Harrison Fisher on
André Castaigne's The Bill-Toppers ($175), or the 1903 decorated jacket
(possibly printed at the Merrymount Press, as the book was) on Helen
Keller's Optimism ($250). Other Wilder catalogues have listed early
jackets from time to time, and at least one of them, number 61 (1993),
had nine entries for pre-1901 items, including an 1827 slip-case for the
1828 volume of Forget Me Not.
The English dealer George Locke also deserves to be singled out for
his attention to early jackets. A collector of science fiction and fantasy
literature, he sells and publishes books under the firm name Ferret
Fantasy, and in February 1988 he published a catalogue entitled Thirty
Years of Dustwrappers 1884-1914. It is a sale catalogue only in part, for
about half of the 159 items are unpriced, marked "NFS" (not for sale).
The primary purpose of the catalogue (inspired, he says in his introduction,
by his purchase of two dozen jacketed books at an Edinburgh
English language books published during the 30 years prior to the first
world war." Each entry, besides describing the binding, gives a detailed
acount of the jacket, often ending with interesting observations.[44] Altogether
the catalogue contains thirty-four entries for pre-1901 jackets,
five of them for 1880s books, including the twenty-five-volume Centenary
Edition of Scott's Waverley Novels (1885-88, £385). The prices for individual
nineteenth-century jacketed books (as opposed to the Scott set)
range from £15 to £350 (for George MacDonald's Phantastes of 1894).
Early jackets also turn up in other Locke catalogues, such as Q88 (January
1990), which lists an 1886 Jules Verne item. Locke's interest in
jackets has not been limited to the pre-1915 period, however. In the
summer of 1978 he purchased, from Picture Books of Brighton, a group
of about three hundred jackets from the 1920s and 1930s (jackets only,
without the books) that had come from a rental library. His account of
the process of cataloguing them[45] (in the Antiquarian Book Monthly
Review article mentioned earlier) is a good outline of some of the clues
(such as prices, blurbs, and the dates of other titles) that must be investigated
to determine whether a given jacket is consistent with what could
have appeared on the earliest copies of the book or whether it is clearly
a later printing. Even in the extensive index to his three-volume catalogue
of his own collection (A Spectrum of Fantasy, 1980-2002), he uses
a symbol to mark each pre-1941 title for which he has a jacket.
Many other dealers, of course, call attention to early jackets when
they have them for sale, generally placing a heading (like "In the Rare
Original Jacket") above the relevant entries in their catalogues.[46]
And
at least one such dealer, Kevin Mac Donnell (of Austin, Texas), who has
handled a hundred or more nineteenth-century jackets over the years,
catalogue.[47] For dealers in twentieth-century first printings, jackets have
for many years been a major concern;[48] and it is no longer uncommon to
find such dealers' booths at book fairs stocked exclusively (or nearly so)
with books in jackets. Because dealers who list books on the internet
often provide images, their websites constitute a large (though uncoordinated
and impermanent) archive of illustrations of jackets.[49] One
of the major firms specializing in modern firsts, Bertram Rota Ltd., has
been a leader in the responsible handling of jackets, as Anthony Rota's
admirable 1998 essay on "Book-Jackets" (in Apart from the Text, mentioned
above) shows. The Rota firm, indeed, has sometimes been taken
to task by those who do not understand the significance of jackets: John
Turner, for instance, in his April 1977 column for Antiquarian Book
Monthly Review, claims that a Rota catalogue shows how "this rather
odd phenomena [of valuing jackets] may have taken root, or is perhaps
being nurtured, in this country and not exclusively in the U.S.A." (4:
161).[50] Dealers who take jackets seriously (like the Rota firm) condemn
the practice of switching jackets as a violation of bibliographical evidence
(a point Anthony Rota makes explicitly); and one is therefore not
surprised to see that his son Julian has recently chaired an Antiquarian
Booksellers Association subcommittee to consider refinements in the
organization's "Terms of the Trade," including the matter of replacing
jackets.
Although Julian Rota's position is the same as his father's,[51]
the work
of his subcommittee has occasioned considerable debate, first within the
ABA leadership in late 2004 and then, in early 2005, in the pages of the
Bookdealer. On 6 January 2005 the Bookdealer printed (under the heading
"Code of Good Practice") a letter from Jonathan Potter, president
of ABA, stating that "the Association is now recommending that its
members indicate clearly not only any variance in condition between
has been supplied from another copy" (p. 9). Two weeks later (20 January
2005) James Fergusson devoted much of his column ("Catalogue
Review") to arguing that switching jackets produces "a sort of forgery"
and to criticize Potter's statement: "it is surely shocking," Fergusson
says, "that the ABA should appear to be condoning or at least licensing
the sophistication of modern first editions." Rather than implying that
dealers may switch jackets so long as they state the fact, the ABA should,
Fergusson says, "be purist in its insistence on authenticity, it should be
rigorous about original condition, it should stand up for bibliographical
truth" (p. 10). This forceful and admirable statement was echoed by
another dealer the following week (27 January 2005): Laurence Worms
said, "The switching of dust-jackets can never be a responsible practice,
whether declared or not" (p. 8), and he added (p. 10) that "the bookseller's
bibliographical duty of care in these matters is actually more important
on the humble and humdrum books that (as yet or perhaps for
ever) fall outside the scope of the full-scale bibliographies" (which offer
"the protection of some other documentation or evidence"). And Potter
himself wrote to affirm that "dust-wrappers must be considered an integral
part of a book" (p. 10). This whole exchange, and its extension in
the ensuing weeks,[52] gives welcome publicity, in a journal aimed at a
booktrade audience, to the fact that switching (or "enhancing") jackets
is as serious a bibliographical offense as inserting or replacing a leaf
within a book.
If jackets are both important and scarce, as well as being integral
parts of the books they cover, one should expect them to command high
prices. Anthony Rota once said, after explaining the significance of
jackets, "For all these reasons my firm has always preached that it was
worth paying a premium to buy a copy in the dustjacket as opposed to
one that lacked it."[53]
That the market has followed this dictum in recent
—such as the 1982 auction prices of £75 and £500 for an unjacketed and
a jacketed copy of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale (1953); Biblioctopus's
1984 price of $17,000 for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891) in
jacket; the 1986 auction price of £2600 for Kipling's Just So Stories
(1902) in jacket (called by Sotheby's "the highest auction price, we believe,
for a dust-jacket; the book on its own being worth about £100");
and the 1999 auction price of £80,700 for Conan Doyle's The Hound of
the Baskervilles (1902) in jacket.[54] F. Scott Fitzgerald jackets have become
celebrated for their high prices, but in fact jacketed copies of books
by all the major authors of the 1920s and 1930s have been steadily rising
for many years. Twenty years ago, for instance, Pepper & Stern (in their
List N) asked $7500 for a jacketed copy of Faulkner's Soldier's Pay
926); but at any book fair today one can see a considerable number
of jacketed copies of books from this period priced in five figures. Dealers
have often made generalizations about the percentage rise in price that
a jacket brings about. Allen Ahearn, in The Book of First Books (1975),
for example, stated, "On the average the presence of a dust wrapper will
increase the value of a book by 50%. On books 20 years old or older the
average increase in value added by the dust wrapper would be closer to
100% providing the dw is in fine condition," though he added that for
Fitzgerald books the figure would be 300-400% (p. 6). Eight years later
the Los Angeles dealer Gordon Hollis was of the opinion that "when a
desirable pre-1925 book has its jacket, it is worth 10 to 15 times more
than a copy without the jacket" (and a post-1925 book is "next to worthless
without its jacket").[55] Some dealers have even worked out charts to
summarize the price levels under varying circumstances,[56] but such attempts
at precision can never be more than vaguely indicative.
Whether jackets are worth the large premium often asked for them
is one of the most ubiquitous topics that jackets have generated, and one
of the silliest. If the price difference between an unjacketed and jacketed
copy of a book is, say, $500, it is pointless to claim, as some purchasers
is that the unjacketed copy is simply a defective copy; and the higher
price is what is required (taking the usual factors into account) to buy
a perfect copy. Even if one, illogically, were to think of jackets as separate
items, there would still be no grounds for complaining about high prices,
for jackets would then have to be compared with so-called ephemera,
and important ephemera of all classes always bring high prices, given
their rarity. Indeed, one should be surprised not at how expensive some
jacketed books are but rather at the fact that, in light of their historical
significance and their scarcity, they are not more expensive. Gordon
Hollis, in his excellent discussion of the reasons that justify high prices
for jacketed books, points out that jackets add significantly to the prices
only of those books that would bring relatively high prices even without
jackets. Then he adds,
This standard may change if, in the future, the collector comes to value any
early dust jacket the way we today value any incunabulum; it may change if
we begin to fancy dust jacket art and come to collect `art deco' or `jazz age'
jackets; it may change if we start collecting jackets with blurbs written by
collected authors, no matter where those blurbs appear. (p. 3891)
Dealers can play a leading role in bringing this desirable change about.
They cannot of course afford to set prices that customers will not pay;
but they do play an important role in educating collectors, and the respect
they give to jackets, manifested in the prices they ask, is a part of
the process. Prices support preservation, for items not widely perceived
to be valuable are less likely to be taken care of, and dealers have already
had a major influence on the preservation of jackets.
The pricing of reputable dealers reflects an expert assessment of
authenticity, which is complicated in the case of jackets by their detachability.
But this problem, though perhaps different in degree, is
certainly no different in kind from the task of critically examining
every other feature of books. One point that did not emerge explicitly
from the Bookdealer exchange is that a distinction must be made between
dealers' own switching of jackets and their selling of books that
came to them with switched jackets. The former should be absolutely
forbidden; it should be considered a practice that no responsible dealer
ought ever to engage in. But the latter is impossible to avoid because
the changing of jackets has long been widespread, and still is. Every
jacket encountered on a book should be initially regarded with suspicion,
until a close inspection leads to the conclusion that the jacket is not
which is the most one can ever say.[57] When dealers find that books in
their stock are wearing switched (or probably switched) jackets, they
should annotate those books accordingly and report the information in
their catalogue entries, just as they would do with any other defects they
have discovered. Some mistakes will of course be made, but the goal
must always be to present as accurate an assessment as possible of the
status of each book in every respect. Once jackets are understood to be
an integral element in what "original condition" means, all the rest—
both pricing and commentary—follows as a matter of course. The professionalism
of dealers requires that they (along with other bibliographical
scholars) set an example of how jackets should be approached as historical
evidence, just as they have regularly treated other aspects of books
in this way. And there are many dealers who have indeed already shown
this sense of responsibility and thus have invigorated the study of jackets.
Tintner's only source, as Leach noted, was Rosner's 1954 book; Leach added that
my 1971 article was the only discussion of jackets not "written from catch-as-catch-can
viewing." Leach's letter appeared in AB Bookman's Weekly, 65 (16 June 1980), 4642; Tintner's
article was in the 19 May 1980 issue, pp. 3871-76 (under the heading "Dust Jacket
Promotion").
Including jacketed copies of Norris's 1899 McTeague ("which," he said, "has an
appraised value of $1,000.00"); the 1892 edition of Parkman's The Oregon Trail, with
illustrations by Remington; Remington's Crooked Trails (1898); and John Muir's Picturesque
California (1888).
In many cases, the purchasers of these $5 items received two or more jackets (as
many as five in two instances) because the preceding item(s) had failed to sell.
Plus one more—a large-paper copy of Stevenson's Underwoods (1887)—in an unprinted
(and thus not necessarily the publisher's) jacket (priced at $950); this copy reappeared
in Wilder catalogue 15 (1985) at $450.
S. Weir Mitchell's The Adventures of Francois (1898), which had fetched $17.50 at
the Leach sale, had been listed in Wilder's catalogue 10 at $400 and now was lowered to $225.
However, one—Irving's The Conquest of Granada (Handy Volume Edition, dated
"ca. 1870's"—was increased from $45 to $150.
For eample, the "Remarks" section in the first entry, for an 1886 book with a pictorial
jacket, notes (among other things) that pictorial jackets not repeating the binding
design seem to be "uncommon before 1900, but occur more frequently with children's and
illustrated books."
Another example of a dealer who has catalogued jackets by themselves (at least in
one catalogue) is Thomas Boss, whose List 984 (1998) contains entries (41, 42) for two
jackets (from 1929-30) with illustrations by Alastair.
The names of some of these dealers can be located in the index to the appended
list. One unusual instance is Hordern House's 1999 catalogue offering (as item 43) Ernest
Giles's Australia Twice Traversed (2 vols., 1889) at $17,500: a full-page description, including
a discussion of the history of dust-jackets (headed "UNRECORDED DUSTJACKETS"
and quoting my 1971 article), is accompanied by a full-page illustration of the pictorial
jackets on this set. Another example of an entry that goes into the history of jackets is in
Rulon-Miller Books catalogue 88 (1988): item 151, for Howells's No Love Lost (1869), is
headed "Third Earliest American Dust-Jacket Extant" (priced at $3500; relisted at that
price in catalogue 92 [1990], item 108). Priscilla Juvelis's catalogues have included an uncommon
number of early jackets: her List 97-3 (1997), for example, contains six nineteenth-century
examples.
I am grateful to him for providing me with a list of many of the jackets and slipcases
that have passed through his hands or are currently in his stock. His interest in the
subject is also shown by two articles (based on his own collections) that he wrote for Firsts,
which include discussions and illustrations of several examples: "Collecting Mark Twain,"
8.7/8 (July/August 1998), 24-61; "American Gift Books," 11.10 (December 2001), 26-51.
One prominent dealer in modern firsts, the late Marguerite Cohn, is supposed to
have suggested that her epitaph might say, "Margie Cohn died worrying about dust jackets"
(reported by Gordon Hollis in the article cited in note 55 below).
An example of a website showing thousands of jackets is the one maintained by
Between the Covers (Merchantville, N.J.): <http://www.betweenthecovers.com>.
Another article critical of the pricing of scarce jackets in general is Jim McCue's
"Judging Books by Their Cover," London in June [The Times], June 1999, p. 6.
As is the subcommittee's, according to Rota's letter in the Bookdealer, 27 January
2005, p. 10.
In the number for 3 February 2005, for example, Fergusson again criticized the ABA
for thus far not taking a strong enough stand; the organization, he says, should be "straightforwardly
banning a practice which seems, on the face of it, as fishy as the Ring" (p. 14).
Six weeks later the discussion was continued, rather aimlessly, by Robert Brown ("A Bookseller's
Ramblings on the Sophisticated Book," 17 March 2005, pp. 7-9): after several
disparaging references to the prices of jacketed copies (for those who "have the money to
indulge in collecting pieces of printed paper at hundreds of pounds per square inch"), he
suggests taking the position, unless there is evidence to the contrary, that any "book and
jacket . . . cannot be assumed to have met before arriving in the shop, book fair or saleroom"
(p. 9). (I am indebted to David McKitterick for calling my attention to the Bookdealer
exchange.)
Though he has also said that "the price differential between books with and without
their dustjackets has now reached seemingly absurd levels." See "Trends in the International
Antiquarian Trade," AB Bookman's Weekly, 88 (16 September 1991), 993-1011
(quotations from p. 1002).
These examples were cited, respectively, in Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 9
(October 1982), 376 (by John Chidley); ibid., 11 (October 1984), 410; Sotheby's Market Report
on Printed Books, Autograph Letters and Manuscripts in London, 1986, p. 1; and Jim McCue
(see note 50 above).
"The Importance of the Dust Jacket" [with the heading "Pricing Factor" above
this title], AB Bookman's Weekly, 72 (5 December 1983), 3891-3902 passim (quotation from
p. 3891).
For example, see D. W. Howard and Ralph Roberts, "Dust Jackets," Book-Mart, 7.5
(January 1984), 21, 26, 30-31; and the table of prices that The Book Baron (Anaheim) would
pay for Alcoholics Anonymous books (AB Bookman's Weekly, 84 [6 November 1989], 1775).
This is true even in those instances where one can turn to a good descriptive bibliography
for guidance. If the jacket one is examining exactly matches a responsible bibliographer's
description, one has strong support for treating it as original to the edition or
printing in question (just as if one had seen the same jacket on multiple copies oneself),
but not necessarily original to the particular copy in hand. If it does not match, it may
nevertheless be original, for it may be a variant not seen by the bibliographer. One should
also keep in mind that publishers sometimes use up a particular batch of jackets by placing
them on copies of printings (or, less often, editions) for which they were not originally
intended. A rare situation in which switched jackets would be easy to detect is illustrated by
Charles Sanford Diehl's The Staff Correspondent (San Antonio: Clegg, 1931): not only are
the copies of this limited edition individually numbered, but the jackets are numbered
as well.
| Studies in bibliography | |