 | Studies in bibliography |  |
IV
Besides disseminating graphic design, transmitting information, and
simply being an element in the original published form of a book, every
jacket plays its role in documenting the history of book-jackets in general.
The account of the early development of the jacket that I offered
in 1971 was based primarily on a sampling of only 262 items through
1900; I now know of more than that number just through 1890 (half
again as many), and the number from the next decade is close to a
thousand.[73]
But I need not retell the story in detail, for the outline remains
the same. There were the sheaths (slip-cases open at one or both
ends) that covered the literary annuals, gift books, and pocket diaries
during the last years of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth
centuries. Then by the 1830s came printed wrappings that were sealed
to cover all edges of books—a style that persisted at least through the
1860s, simultaneously with the emergence of jackets with flaps. The
latter form—that is, the one that became standard—carried little printing
in general during the nineteenth century, often only on the spine (or
the spine and front panel), though there were early examples in which
advertising appeared on the back and illustrations on the front and back
(the flaps were not much used for printing until the 1890s). Although
jackets of the 1890s and the first decade or so of the twentieth century
frequently had decorations or illustrations, those embellishments were
generally derived from, if not actual reproductions of, the binding designs;
and the jackets were clearly secondary to the bindings from the
point of view of design and still largely served as protection for the
elaborate bindings, though with a marketing function showing up in
century that publishers' bindings began to grow plainer and the jackets
more decorative.
If this familiar story is not altered by the knowledge of a larger
number of nineteenth-century jackets, there are nevertheless several contributions
made by the expanded list, in addition to serving as a nucleus
to which additional examples can be added. One is simply that the story
now rests on a broader base of evidence. Second, by providing some help
in the task of locating and examining a larger number of early jackets,
the new list can encourage further study and potentially support additional
insights. Third, it permits more detailed conclusions about the
practices of some publishers and thus allows one to postulate the existence
of jackets for certain books at the time of their publication, even
when none are known to have survived. If, for example, one wondered
whether Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (Smith, Elder, 1886) or the
hardcover issue of Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (Harper, 1890)
originally appeared in jackets, one could consult the list and feel fairly
certain in the first case and quite certain in the second that these books
were published in jackets (since the list records a Smith, Elder book in
1882 and one in 1885 and shows eight Harper books in 1890). And when
one book from a series or set is listed (such as a volume of the Longman
"Badminton Library" from 1888 or the Warne "Chandos Classics" from
1889) one can sensibly believe that the others also once had jackets or
boxes.
Although such an exercise provides useful support for a surmise, one
could argue that the range of examples in the list as a whole may give
one some reason to suppose that any book from a major firm after the
mid-1870s or so is probably more likely than not to have been published
in a jacket. The list can serve these various purposes even though it is
not a systematic attempt at a census of all surviving examples of early
British and American publishers' detachable book-coverings. It is simply
a list of those that have come to my attention during more than thirty-five
years (including, that is, those in my 1971 list as well as those encountered
since), and there are unquestionably many hundreds more
that I have not learned about. But even if the total is two or three times
the present number, what is now known constitutes a significant mass
of evidence for studying an extremely scarce and widely scattered body
of material. A few observations not made in 1971 are therefore in order.[74]
It seems reasonably certain that the earliest detachable coverings enclosing
publishers' bindings were the sheaths that came with pocket diaries
beginning in the late eighteenth century and with children's doll-dressing
books beginning about 1810. Examples of the former are known
for The Royal Repository, or Polite Pocket Diary for 1796 (London: J.
Evance and W. Richardson, 1795) and The American Ladies & Gentlemans
Pocket Almanac and Belles Lettres Repository for 1802 (New York:
David Longworth, 1801); examples of the latter from 1810 to 1814
survive for a number of the little books with loose paper-dolls and costumes
published by S. & J. Fuller at their Temple of Fancy. The
German Taschenbuch of this period, with sheaths sometimes printed
with calendars, was probably the model, at least for the diaries.
Thus when in 1822 the London publisher Rudolph Ackermann, drawing
on his knowledge of the German custom, set in motion the vogue for
annual gift books in the English-speaking world by publishing the first
number of the Forget Me Not, there was already a precedent for enclosing
annuals in sheaths. For nine years, through the volume for 1831
(1830), Ackermann published the Forget Me Not in sheaths, as confirmed
and explained by the Gentleman's Magazine review of the volume
for 1832. According to the reviewer, Ackermann considered the
glazed-paper-over-board covers no longer "worthy of this great age of
improvement" and therefore had begun to clothe the annual "in the
splendid but durable attire of crimson silk, which supersedes the necessity
of a pasteboard case, as heretofore, to protect it from the soil of a
dusty table."[75]
Many of the other annuals, on both sides of the Atlantic,
also employed sheaths during the 1820s. Although the number of examples
in my list is small, comprising (in addition to eight volumes of
the Forget Me Not) only sixteen instances, they are distributed among
eleven annuals published in Boston and Philadelphia as well as London,
and thus they imply a fairly widespread and regular use. Certainly the
sheath of the literary annual, which was an extremely popular genre,
gave prominence to the idea of a detachable publisher's covering, and
of the book-jacket, since its function was to attract and protect."[76]
The next step was the use of printed wrapping paper rather than
sheaths to cover copies of annuals; the paper—printed with identifying
text—was sealed around each book, enclosing it completely. Although
the earliest examples known are on British annuals, The Keepsake for
1833 (Longman) and The Juvenile Scrap-Book for 1845-50 (Fisher, then
Jackson), this style of covering was also used for other kinds of books at
least through the 1860s. Surviving examples are understandably scarce,
since these wrappings were likely to have been destroyed in the process
of removing them in order to open the books. But a survivor on a book
published by Appleton (New York) and Whitaker (London) in 1857
(Richard S. Gedney's Poetical Works), two others on books published
by Longman in 1860 (Edward Falkener's Daedalus and The Museum of
Classical Antiquities), and one on a book published by the Catholic
Publication Society (New York) in 1869 (Aubrey De Vere's Irish Odes)
suggest—since at least two of the publishers of these books were major
trade firms—that the practice had a continuing life even after jackets
with flaps began to be used. Indeed, sealed wrapping is not unknown in
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: at least one number of
Bradley His Book (no. 3, July 1896) was wrapped in glassine printed with
the notice that it was to be unsealed only by the owner; and Oliver
Herford and John Cecil Clay's Happy Days (Kennerley, 1917) came
completely sealed in unprinted glassine.[77]
The covers were of course
visible through the glassine, which was thus a forerunner of shrink-wrapping.
Other forms of coverings—related to sealed wrappings in that they
cover books more fully than the now traditional jackets with flaps do—
have been used over the years for certain types of books. For pamphlets
or thin books, the equivalent of a slip-case may seem more like an envelope.
The earliest item in my list is a four-flapped wrapping (like the
eighteenth-century mailing covers) around a 1791 Philadelphia pamphlet
by John William Gerar de Brahm, with a 115-word presentation
epistle (to be signed by the author) printed on the inside, where the
pamphlet would lie. One might also best describe as an envelope the
of Rip Van Winkle. And some of Kate Greenaway's small books for children—judging
from surviving examples of her Almanack for 1890 and
1891 (Routledge)—were provided with mailing envelopes.[78] (Of course,
publishers' envelopes—sometimes unprinted—for pamphlets, especially
those intended as gifts, continued to appear in the twentieth century, as
on some of the Paul Elder booklets.) Another variation was to have three
flaps at both front and back, so that a flap could fold over each edge of
the covers (tops and bottoms as well as fore-edges): an 1878 example is
a cloth jacket (now in the Bodleian) on William Stirling Maxwell's
Antwerp Delivered in MDLXXVII (Edinburgh: David Douglas). A possible
example, on Herbert Kleist's copy of Love Poems and Sonnets by
"Owen Innsly" (Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1883), may instead be another
instance of what was once a sealed wrapping, since the flaps are less than
an inch wide and may well have originally been pasted together to cover
the edges of the sheets of the book.
In fact, some of the survivors among previously sealed wrappings are
presently soiled, folded, or cut in such a way as to indicate that they
survived by being forced to fit the book in the fashion of present-day
jackets with flaps, so that they could continue to be used to protect the
books during reading. On occasion publishers even encouraged readers
to engage in this practice: a surviving jacket (in the Leach sale, lot 65)
for John E. Wheelock's In Search of Gold (New York: Thompson, 1884)
has a front flap printed with the words "Cut open at this line and use
wrapper for outside cover." The activity of converting wrappings to
jackets calls to mind the fact that models for jackets with flaps certainly
existed in the early nineteenth century, whether or not they were used
by publishers (and they may well have been), for the circulating libraries
placed books in jackets printed with their names and the rules their
members were supposed to follow. Thanks to Michael Zinman, I can
report three American examples: one for the Glazier, Masters & Co.
Circulating Library (Hallowell, Maine), with the printed date of October
1828; another for Roorbach's Circulating Library (Charleston, S.C.),
which includes an advertisement for Roorbach's book and stationery
store (this jacket is presently on the December 1831 issue of the London
of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York.
Circulating-library books obviously needed protection, but there is
evidence that individual owners also wished to protect their books,
sometimes using wallpaper or other decorated paper for the purpose.[79]
The rise of cloth binding clearly produced the urge to protect those
bindings, and manufacturers were glad to satisfy this demand with ready-made
covers of varying sizes. By at least the 1870s the London firm of Marcus
Ward & Co. Limited was selling "Marcus Ward's Adaptable Book
Covers, (registered) for Book Clubs, Lending Libraries, Schools and
Home Use." Available in seven-, eight-, and nine-inch sizes, at one shilling
per dozen, these covers were made of patterned paper with a blank space
on the spine for lettering. In America, Sherwood's of New York made for
P. F. Van Everen "The `Van Everen' Self-Fitting Adjustable Book Covers"
(patented 14 February 1888), advertised as "the Aristocrat of book covers"
and as "the standard of perfection since extra covers came into use";
they were offered in three sizes made of "heavy craft paper which sheds
water and is impervious to moisture," with flaps to be folded over all
edges and glued according to detailed instructions printed on the jacket
("leaving no part exposed, even on flat juveniles"). Discounts were available
for libraries and schools, and "Van Everen's perforated and gummed
numbers & alphabets" could also be purchased, so that titles and dates
could be affixed to the jackets.[80]
The existence of this kind of product
should not be taken to indicate that publishers' jackets were uncommon;
rather, the emphasis on the durability and protective features of these
and easily detached jackets provided by publishers. Many individuals no
doubt made their own jackets instead of buying such products, and one
can never be sure whether a plain (unprinted) jacket on a nineteenth-century
book was placed there by an owner, perhaps to replace a damaged
printed jacket, or by the publisher—except in those rare cases
where one encounters a number of copies in identical jackets.[81] That
is why I have limited my list of early jackets to ones that are printed, but
there are many examples of plain jackets that one is tempted to believe
are actually publishers' jackets.[82]
Although in assembling my list I have recorded only British and
American examples, it is important to be aware of the European context,
as the relation of the slip-cased Taschenbuch to the form of the
English-language annuals suggests.[83]
Sheaths continued to be used for
French as well as German annuals for several decades,[84]
but sheaths and
least as early as 1839 modern-style paper jackets were apparently in use
in Germany. Jerome E. Anderson reported to me in 1971 a copy of an
1839 Bädeker book, Friedrich Hoffmann's Funfzig Räthsel und Bilder
für Kinder von 8-12 Jahren, in a jacket of pink porous paper printed on
the front (title), spine (title, author, decoration), and back (list of other
titles). And by the 1860s and 1870s there are such examples as Chamisso's
Peter Schlemihl (Leipzig, 1860), Lessing's Nathan der Weise (Berlin,
1868, with the date on the jacket), Karl Wilhelm Osterwald's Erzählungen
aus der alten deutschen Welt für Jung und Alt (Halle, 1868, with
the date on the jacket), Album für Deutschlands Töchter (7th ed.; Leipzig,
1871), and Hessel Gerritsz's The Arctic North-East and West Passage
(Amsterdam, 1878). Eric Quayle, whose collection contained a copy of
the Osterwald jacket in 1971, called it "The earliest printed dust-wrapper
that can be dated with certainty. . . . No printed dust-wrapper manufactured
earlier . . . is known to have survived." This comment (if we exclude
slip-cases and wrappings that enclose books completely) could
rather be applied to the 1839 Hoffmann jacket, which—as far as my
knowledge goes—precedes the earliest reported English modern-style
jackets by about two decades.[86]
The Hoffmann jacket makes clear that the idea of using the back
panel for advertising occurred early, and it reminds one that the earliest
advertisement on the back. In light of the many nineteenth-century
jackets that have printing only on the spine, or the spine and front
panel, one may be surprised by these early instances of advertising on
the back. But one should remember that there was a model ready to
hand in the form of the advertisements and testimonials printed on the
covers of some books in the boards-and-label period spanning the last
years of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth
century. Although those covers were not readily detachable, publishers
assumed that many owners would regard them as temporary and have
them replaced with leather bindings. As coverings that were truly detachable
and dispensable came to be used over bindings that were meant
to be retained, it would have been natural to continue the practice of
placing advertising in the same visible position, as the 1833 Keepsake
and the 1869 Magnolia (New York: Leavitt) did. But the custom was
clearly not universal (nor was it, of course, on the printed boards earlier):
examples are known from major publishers in the 1870s (Lee & Shepard,
Putnam, Routledge) and onward, but there is a large number of surviving
jackets from the 1870-1900 period with blank back panels.
This observation reinforces the point (which I made in 1971) that
the use of jacket surfaces in the second half of the nineteenth century
does not display a steady general development but rather reflects the
practices of individual publishers. John Carter was saying much the
same thing in his historic letter to the Publisher and Bookseller (19
August 1932) when he noted that the 1860 jacket for Pilgrim's Progress
"is so far from looking primitive that it would not look out of place on
a book published to-day." Although one can locate jackets of the 1880s
with printing on the front, spine, back, and even the flaps,[87]
one also
finds (for example) many Harper and Houghton Mifflin jackets of the
1890s printed only on the spines. Similarly, the retail price was often
included on jacket spines or fronts from the 1870s through the 1910s,[88]
or on flaps (I know of Lothrop examples from 1888 and 1895), or on box
labels (Macmillan, 1894); but often the price is not given at all on jackets
of this period. The indication of the number of copies in print also
the jacket for Poe's poems in Griffin's "Emerald Series"; and a later
printing of an 1883 Revell book, Hannah Whitall Smith's The Christian's
Secret of a Happy Life, carried a jacket proclaiming "Thirty-Fifth
Thousand"); but the practice does not seem to have become common
in the nineteenth century. Illustrations, too, were used at least as early
as 1860 (on the Longman edition of Pilgrim's Progress) but were not a
regular feature of nineteenth-century jackets. And binding designs were
repeated on jackets by some publishers in the 1860s (Jonathan Couch's
The History of the Fishes of the British Islands, published in London
by Groombridge & Sons in 1862-65, and The Bryant Festival at "The
Century," published by Appleton in 1865); but many books with interesting
bindings in the 1890s have unattractive typographic jackets.
Among the few general trends that can be asserted with some confidence
is the dominance of the modern-style flapped jacket over other types of
covering by at least the mid-1860s. Another, as I suggested earlier, is that
such jackets were as commonly used by publishers during the last quarter
of the nineteenth century as they were during the twentieth century. I
base this conclusion not simply on the number of surviving examples
but also on the fact that most of the major British and American publishers
are repeatedly represented, with a wide range of types of books, as well
as many smaller publishers from a variety of geographical locations.[89]
Just as the nineteenth century began with gift books in slip-cases, so
the end of the century saw a similar phenomenon. The books were not
annuals but rather popular novels, classics, and travel books that could
be marketed in fancy illustrated editions, frequently in two volumes;
and the slip-cases were not sheaths but boxes with their open sides corresponding
to where the spines of the books would show and with
printed labels affixed to the opposite side (and sometimes the wider
sides). These books, though their bindings were protected by boxes,
also were generally supplied with jackets, commonly made of cloth
backed with stiff paper and printed only on the spines.[90]
In some instances
the open (spine) side of the box was covered with a removable
lid, and the label was pasted on one end of the box, indicating that these
that the books inside were resting on their fore-edges. When certain
one-volume works were given this treatment—especially thin books with
elaborate bindings, often containing a single heavily illustrated poem—
the lid usually fit over one of the wide sides of the box, exposing the
front cover of the book (or the front panel of the jacket) when removed.
If such boxes for one- and two-volume gift editions were a striking
phenomenon of the late nineteenth century,[91] the use of boxes with
printed labels or hinged lids for multi-volume sets went back at least to
mid-century: they were commonly used for series of children's books,
such as "Cousin Lucy's Stories" by Jacob Abbott (Auburn, N.Y.: Derby
& Miller, 1850), and for standard sets, such as The Handy-Volume
Shakespeare in thirteen volumes (London: Bradbury, Evans; New York:
Wynkoop, 1867).
In the early years of the twentieth century there was little change in
publishers' practices in using jackets and boxes. That their function was
still largely to protect decorative bindings is suggested by a jingle printed
on the jacket of the 1913 Methuen edition of John Oxenham's Bees in
Amber: "This outer wrap is only meant / To keep my coat from detriment.
/ Please take it off, and let me show / The better one I wear
below."[92]
It was not always necessary to take the protective jacket off in
order to see the binding, or at least part of it, as my copy of Margaret
Turnbull's Looking after Sandy (Harper, 1914) shows: the jacket has an
oval hole in the front panel, revealing the picture that is pasted to the
front cover of the binding.[93]
Despite the appearance, before this time, of
jackets with illustrations and blurbs printed on them, the idea that the
artistry and verbiage of jackets could be a marketing tool had not yet
become a dominant force in the production of jackets, though it was
certainly a growing one. And during the 1910s this situation changed
dramatically, so that by the 1920s many publishers thought of jackets
rather than bindings as the place for striking designs. Since jackets were
an established presence, it made sense to use their surfaces to the full
of book-jackets is primarily the story of shifting tastes in graphic design
and in advertising style, rather than of changes in form or function.
One formal development worth noting, however, is the occasional
addition of the wrap-around band or "flash," a narrow strip of paper
extending around the jacket, with ends either stuck together or folded
inside the book covers along with the jacket flaps. (An example is the one
on the American edition of Edward Dahlberg's The Flea of Sodom [New
Directions, 1950], which quotes from Herbert Read's introduction.) Such
bands were naturally meant to attract additional attention to the books
they adorned and often reported a late-breaking news item, such as the
award of a major prize to the book or its author. The result for collectors
and other students of publishing history was to create an additional
challenge, for bands are understandably more ephemeral than jackets,
and their survival rate is even lower.[94]
A similar challenge is locating the dust-jackets for paperback books.
The emergence of mass-market paperbacks in the 1930s was of course
one of the major events in Anglo-American publishing history in the
twentieth century, and by that time jackets were such an established part
of publishing that one should not be surprised by their use on some early
Albatross and Penguin paperbacks.[95]
There were even more specific reasons,
however, for the jackets that appeared on Pocket Books and Bantam
titles in the 1940s: jackets with new illustrations were added to
resuscitate slow-selling titles, or to call attention to movies, or to indicate
paperback collectors (like the Gatsby jacket for twentieth-century hardcover
collectors) is the Stanley Meltzoff jacket on some of the later printings
(beginning in 1945) of the Pocket Books edition of The Maltese
Falcon. [96] (A related phenomenon is the use of jackets on wrapper-bound
proof copies: an example, reported by David L. Vander Meulen, is the
"Uncorrected Proof" of Frances Parkinson Keyes's The Gold Slippers
[Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958], in wrappers and with a jacket.)
If surviving examples of paperback jackets and nineteenth-century
hardcover jackets are scarce enough that it is feasible to list them, a different
means must be found for gaining bibliographical control over the
vast quantities of twentieth-century examples on hardcover books. We
can look to descriptive bibliographies of authors and presses and to
monographs on graphic artists for the recording of many significant
jackets, but the number dealt with in this way will always be a tiny
fraction of the total. The logical solution is for libraries to take note of
the presence of jackets in their cataloguing of books[97]
and to make it
possible for such references to be located through searching in electronic
catalogues. Some special-collections libraries already do this, but others
do not.[98]
In any case, the prior requirement is for libraries to preserve
been loath to do, except for books that go into special collections
(though public libraries have often kept jackets, with a protective covering
around them, on circulating books). The situation is reflected in
Robert A. Tibbetts's comment, regarding the Charvat Collection of
pre-1901 American fiction at Ohio State University, that "most of the
dustjackets that once accompanied its books were lost to library processing
before the collection became an entity." Libraries' disregard for
jackets is epitomized by the response of a major research library when it
was offered the opportunity to purchase en bloc the great Leach collection
of American nineteenth-century jacketed books: it rejected the
offer on the grounds that a large portion of the books duplicated those
already in the collection, ignoring entirely the fact that none of the
jackets would have been duplicates. Barbara Ringer, when she was
Register of Copyrights in the U. S. Copyright Office, was so "appalled"
by the Library of Congress practice of throwing away the "vast majority"
of the jackets it received that she arranged to store them at her own
expense.[99]
Library practices vary, as A. S. A. Struik discovered in the mid-1990s
when he conducted a survey of eighteen Dutch libraries and thirteen
national libraries in other countries. His questionnaire asked, among
other things, whether the jackets of newly acquired books were saved
(and if so, how they were described and housed) and whether pre-1900
jackets had been inventoried or were ever purchased as such. The replies
were not encouraging. Although many of the libraries claimed to save
some of the jackets on newly acquired books, these affirmative responses
were often undercut by various qualifications, and only two libraries
(both Dutch) reported any effort to describe their jackets, even superficially.
And not a single library answered yes to the question whether it
intended to "collect or simply save" jackets in the future. As far as pre1900
jackets are concerned, only one library—the Museum Meermanno
Westreenianum in The Hague—indicated that it maintained an inventory
of such jackets, and only five (the British Library, the Library of
Congress, and three Dutch libraries) stated that they had ever bought a
book purely for the sake of its jacket.[100]
That so many libraries, including copyright-deposit libraries, are so
of Alan Smith, who calls it a "tragedy" that libraries have shirked their
"obligations" to scholars by engaging in the "vandalism" of destroying
jackets. This language is not too strong because book-jackets, as an important
class of primary documentation of publishing history, are unquestionably
part of what research libraries are pledged to preserve.
Other categories have been neglected in the past, such as publishers'
archives, but for a long time now the value of such records has been well
understood. It is shocking, therefore, that in the early twenty-first century,
with the field called "book history" flourishing, there should be so
relatively little thinking directed toward the preservation and cataloguing
of past and future book-jackets. The picture is not entirely bleak:
thanks to the understanding of collectors and dealers, which has become
widespread only in the past generation or so, special-collections departments
are now in possession of a great many jackets, which have arrived
largely as parts of collections but sometimes through the purchase of
single items. These jackets are likely to be noteworthy because of their
age or the fame of the books they cover, and their preservation seems
assured. What we need to be concerned about is the fate of all the other
jackets that survive and all that will appear on new books in the future.
Some large libraries have not destroyed all the jackets that came their
way; but those they have saved (often intermittently and inconsistently)
tend to be very difficult (or in some cases nearly impossible) to use because
of the way they have been stored and the lack of adequate (or any)
cataloguing.[101] Many jackets of the past are lost, but many others await
an act of reclamation.
The idea of a "Jacket Conservation Year," proposed by Alan Smith,
may be unrealistic; but there is reason to hope that we are entering a
period of consciousness-raising in regard to jackets, judging from the
conference on jackets that was sponsored by the Institute of English
Studies at the University of London on 19-20 September 2005,[102]
along
with the news that a future series of Panizzi Lectures may deal with the
subject. Libraries must be encouraged to face (and be given assistance in
all the jackets in their possession that are not in special-collections stacks,
as well as all that come with future acquisitions. Whether jackets are
kept on the books, with mylar around them, or filed separately will be
decided differently by different libraries; the important matter is that
they be carefully and systematically preserved. Second is the inclusion
of a reference to the presence of a jacket in catalogue entries for
books, so that a library's jacket holdings can be ascertained as readily as
its book holdings. Third is the requirement for taking jackets into
account in acquisition policies for noncurrent books.
Besides these basic necessities, the creation of a cooperative database
of digitized images of jackets is a great desideratum (despite the
problems that copyright may pose), so long as it does not lead anyone
to suppose that the originals can be disposed of—a response
that has all too often followed the microfilming or digitization of monographs
and serials. Reproductions of jackets, like reproductions of anything
else, can never replace originals.[103]
And the need for the preservation
of multiple copies is just as crucial in the case of jackets as it is for
books, newspapers, and all other printed items, since jackets are just as
susceptible to variation among copies and since the value of widespread
access to originals is just as great. Whenever libraries in quantity begin
to regard the collecting and cataloguing of jackets as an accepted part of
their mission and start contributing to a union database of images, we
will be well on the way to rescuing what remains of a body of material
that enriches publishing history, and thus cultural and intellectual history
as well.
By "items" I mean entries in my list; some entries refer to more than one jacket (as
in the case of two-volume works or multi-volume sets).
One entry in my 1971 list has now been deleted, despite the attention it had received
prior to 1971: William W. Lord's Poems (New York: Appleton, 1845). What was supposedly
a jacket for this book was reported by T. O. Mabbott (Publishers' Weekly, 133 [16 April 1938],
1632) as being bound into a copy at the Huntington Library; it was then mentioned and
illustrated in Rosner's The Growth of the Book-Jacket (1954), p. xiv, and was also illustrated
in Publishers' Weekly, 159 (10 February 1951), 901, and in Kurt Weidemann's Book Jackets
and Record Covers: An International Survey (1969), p. vi. But a copy of this book at the
Houghton Library shows that it was published in paper wrappers; and the two leaves of
printed decorated paper bound into the rebound copy at the Huntington and another one
at Harvard are most likely the front and back of the wrappers, not the front and back of a
jacket.
"The Annuals. Forget Me Not, for 1832. By F. Schoberl. Ackermann," Gentleman's
Magazine, 101 (October 1831), 340-342. This review is quoted by Eleanore Jamieson in "The
Binding Style of the Gift Books and Annuals," in the 1973 reprint of F. W. Faxon's Literary
Annuals and Gift Books (1912), pp. 7-17 (see p. 8); it is also quoted by B. J. McMullin (in
the article cited in the text above at note 32), who corrects the page citation.
Victorian Publishers' Book-Bindings in Paper (1983), p. 10. Sheaths were used on
other books of this period as well—such as Hoyle's Games (1803), cited and illustrated by
McLean (p. 19)—and on children's games and peep-shows—such as The Swan of Elegance
(1814), in the Pierpont Morgan Library, and The Areaorama (1825), described in Judith St.
John, The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books (Toronto Public Library, 1958-75),
p. 1050.
The Bradley was described in Colophon Book Shop catalogue 10 (LaGrange, Ill.,
1978), item 106 ($85); the Herford is in my Kennerley collection.
The Gerar de Brahm example, in the Lilly Library, was discussed by Josiah Q.
Bennett in the December 1971 Serif (see note 31 above); the Darley was the first lot in the
1984 Leach sale (see part II above); the 1890 Greenaway (with a jacket as well as an envelope)
is in the collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin; the 1891 Greenaway was
offered in Wilder Books catalogue 9 (1984), item 51 ($675) and reoffered in catalogue 15
(1985), item Q ($275), where the envelope is described as a jacket with an enlarged back
flap that can be folded over the front.
Among the books and pamphlets with wallpaper jackets at the American Antiquarian
Society are James Janeway's A Token for Children (1821) and Amos Blanchard's Book of
Martyrs (3rd ed., 1832); among the library's books with added jackets inscribed by early
owners is a copy of Daniel Adams's The Scholar's Arithmetic (1828), with a jacket inscribed
"Harry G. Taintor's book, Plainfield Academy, September 7, 1828." The paper-backed
leather jacket—with lettering on the spine—on a copy of the 1819 edition of Richard
Martyrs (3rd ed. 1832); among the library's books with added jackets inscribed by early
another example of a jacket supplied by an owner; but because it was possibly provided by
the author-publisher or his bookseller, I have included it provisionally in the appended list
of early publishers' jackets (where a further discussion can be found).
The Victoria and Albert Museum has examples of the Marcus Ward jackets on
books in the Alexander Dyce and John Forster collections, which came to the museum in
1869 and 1876, respectively. (I am grateful to Rowan Watson for this information.)
Michael Zinman has a copy of an advertisement for the Van Everen jackets, and Ellen
K. Morris and Edward S. Levin have an example of Size A. Zinman also has some later
examples of jackets for organizations, such as the Eclectic Reading Club jacket, dated 1893,
on a copy of Harper's for August 1893, and the "Texan Book Cover" ("Designed for Use in
the Public Schools of Texas"), found on a copy of Elementary Spanish Prose Book (Benjamin
H. Sanborn & Co., 1924). Many other commercially manufactured jackets for use on school
books were produced in the twentieth century.
As with the Newberry Library's remainder stock of Memorial Sketch of Dr. William
Frederick Poole of 1895 (one of the private printings supervised by Stone & Kimball).
A few examples (out of many) are the following: J. David Williams (ed.), America
Illustrated (Manhattan Printing and Publishing Co., 1877), listed in Bromer catalogue 37
(1985), item 2 ($125); Trollope, How the "Mastiffs" Went to Iceland (Virtue, 1878), cited by
Jim McCue (see note 50 above); Stevenson, Underwoods (Chatto & Windus, 1887), listed in
Wilder catalogue 9 (1984), item 123 ($950), and 15 (1985), item DI ($450); Twain, The
£1,000,000 Bank Note, cited by Kevin Mac Donnell (see note 47 above); Housman, A
Shropshire Lad (Kegan Paul, 1896), cited in Robert F. Metzdorf, The Tinker Library (1959),
entry 1243 ("original glazed paper jacket"); Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Smithers,
1898), listed in Black Sun Books 1976 catalogue (New York Miscellany), item 50 ($275);
Howells, Their Silver Wedding Journey (1899), listed in Trebizond Rare Books catalogue 6
(1977), item 63 ($60). (See also the 1984 Leach sale catalogue, lots 41, 77, 78, 79, 80 [plus
wrapping paper], 82, 101, 114, 115, 118, 129, 148 [through 1890].) An unprinted jacket over
wrappers is on Harriet P. James, Cruise of Yacht "Coronet" to Hawaiian Islands and Japan
(New York: William C. Martin, 1897), in the Amherst College Library (reported by John
Lancaster). Three examples of unprinted cloth jackets are on John Muir, Picturesque
California (New York and San Francisco: Dewing, 1888), in Leach sale (1984), lot 110 ($575);
Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (Houghton Mifflin, 1890), in Leach sale, lot 146 (two two-volume
sets; $5); and Eugene Field, The House (Scribner, 1896), listed in Wilder Books
catalogue 15 (1985), item L ($225). Michael Zinman reported to me an unprinted sheath on
Elias Smith and Abner Jones, Hymns (Portsmouth: Smith, 1815), and a box (lacking its top,
which may have had a label) for the four volumes of Jacob Abbott's The William Gay Series
(Hurd & Houghton, 1869); and Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin have (among others)
an unprinted box for Sentiments and Similes of William Shakespeare (2nd ed., Longman,
1857). One glassine jacket (out of many) that is likely to be the publisher's is on Henryk
Sienkiewicz, In Vain (Little, Brown, 1899), in the Morris-Levin collection.
See the illustration of Das Taschenbuch for 1804 (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1803) in Anne
Renier's Friendship's Offering: An Essay on the Annuals and Gift Books of the 19th Century
(1964), plate 2 (facing p. 9).
The Parisian publishers Louis Janet and LeFuel were responsible for many annuals
in sheaths with printed labels on the sides. The collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward
S. Levin contains Janet examples from 1817 (Hommage aux dames), 1821 (Le luth français),
and 1828 (Annales romantiques) and LeFuel examples from 1819 (Le musée des théâtres),
1823 (Hommage aux demoiselles), and 1823 and 1832 (Almanach dédié aux dames), as well
as a Marcilly example from 1821 (Etrennes de polymnie); and I have an 1824 Janet example
(Lyre des demoiselles). (Morris and Levin in their book [see note 63 above] cite the 1828 Janet
[item 8] and two 1823 LeFuel items [9, 10].) In 1971 Charles Mann reported to me two
German annuals in Philip Shelley's collection that were published twenty-six years apart:
the Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1804 von Wieland und Goethe (published by Cotta of
Tübingen in 1803, with calendars on the sides of the sheath), and the Urania for 1830
(published by Bruckhaus of Leipzig in 1829, with a printed label on one of the narrow sides
of the sheath). Morris and Levin report that they have seen a Viennese example from 1826:
Aglaja: Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1827, published by Johann B. Wallishausser.
Such as La pastourelle (1819), Blanche Marguerite (1827), and Jean-Pierre Brès's
Voyage pittoresque et romantique sur la cheminée (1828), all Louis Janet publications in
sheaths; Contes de toutes les couleurs and Musée des dames et des demoiselles (each 6 vols.;
Marcilly, ca. 1825-30), in two-piece boxes with title labels on the top panels; and Réglement
concernant l'exercise et les manoeuvres de l'infanterie (3 vols.; Levrault, 1831), in a box
printed on three sides. (The last example is in the Newberry Library; the others are in the
collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin—and the Musée is cited in their book
[see note 63 above], item 5.)
This statement is accurate even if the leather jacket on a copy of the 1819 edition
of Richard Phillips's The Universal Preceptor is a publisher's jacket (see note 79 above),
for it can scarcely be regarded as a modern-style jacket. The Quayle quotation is from The
Collector's Book of Books (1971), pp. 114-115 (including an illustration of the front panel,
with its printed date). The Chamisso and Lessing jackets were reported by Thomas Warburton
in Bibliographical Notes & Queries, 1.4 (October 1935), 6; the Album is in the
collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin; the Gerritsz is listed in D. & E. Lake's
catalogue 84 (1987), item 108.
The earliest examples I have encountered of text or illustration on flaps are the
jackets for the Black edition of the Waverley Novels (London, 1885-87; Ferret Fantasy 1988
catalogue, item 123), Charles Hindley's The History of the Catnach Press (London: The
author, 1886; described by Peter C. G. Isaac in the 1975 Library article cited earlier), and
two books published by the Chicago firm Belford, Clarke: George Macdonald's Wilfrid
Cumbermede (in the "Caxton Edition" series, 1888; Leach sale, lot 108), and Jane Porter's
Thaddeus of Warsaw (1889; Leach sale, lot 124).
Prices had earlier appeared on some of the mid-century wrappings (like those on
The Juvenile Scrap-Book for 1847-50).
The 1875 dividing line is of course approximate, and probably too conservative,
judging from the nature of the surviving examples of the preceding ten years; but the small
body of evidence makes further analysis difficult.
That the term for what we now call "jackets" was not yet established in the 1890s
is shown by an advertisement for a boxed series in Publishers' Weekly, 43 (28 January 1893),
207: "Illustrated Edition of Popular Poets" was said to be available in "cloth slip wrappers,
each book in a cloth box." As late as 1932 Henry McAnally, in "Book-Wrappers," Book
Collector's Quarterly, 6 (April 1932), 10-17, was speculating about what the object ought
to be called; he felt that it had "not yet attained to a settled name" but that "the catalogues
of the greater and more conscious booksellers" use "dust-wrapper" (p. 10).
Quoted by Michael Moon in a letter to the Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 13
(January 1986), 25.
Holes were frequently placed in the spines of jackets for series books, allowing the
same jacket to be used for all volumes, since the titles of the individual volumes showed
through the holes. Another, far less common, style of jacket that permits the binding to be
seen consists of clear plastic with printed paper flaps attached; two examples in my possession
are for Monk Gibbon's Seventeen Sonnets (London: Joiner & Steele, 1932) and
Christopher Hassall's Words by Request (London: Arthur Barker, 1952). (Bindings can of
course be seen through shrink-wrapping when books thus published do not have jackets;
for detachable printed material that may nevertheless be supplied, see note 94 below.)
The same can be said of the printed paper or card sometimes laid on the cover of
an unjacketed book so as to be visible thorugh shrink-wrapping, thus supplying the descriptive
text that would otherwise be on the jacket (an example is my Guide to the Study
of United States Imprints [Harvard, 1971]).
Jackets over wrappers were not unknown earlier: a famous example is James Whitcomb
Riley's "The Old Swimmin' Hole" and 'Leven More Poems (Indianapolis: Hitt, 1883);
and an example from the following year is James B. Thayer's A Western Journey with Mr.
Emerson (Little, Brown, 1884). (A copy of the Riley was in the 1990 Bradley Martin sale,
lot 2236; one of the Thayer was in the 1984 Leach sale, lot 64, and in the current stock of
Mac Donnell Rare Books.) But as a category they should be subdivided into two groups,
according to whether or not the wrappers are printed. Jackets over printed wrappers are
comparable to jackets on hardcover books; but jackets over unprinted wrappers constitute a
style of binding, in which the "jacket," though detachable, is an essential part of the binding,
not a covering for it. Both the Riley and the Thayer books in fact illustrate both types:
the binding of the Riley, for example, consists of a loose cream wrapper, printed like the
title-page, folded over an attached unprinted paper wrapper; over this double wrapper is a
brown-paper jacket with simpler printing. See Anthony J. and Dorothy R. Russo, A Bibliography
of James Whitcomb Riley (1944), p. 3. Kevin Mac Donnell has reported to me some
nineteenth-century examples of detachable printed wrappers over unprinted card-stock
wrappers (the kind of detachable covering I do not consider a "jacket"): Oliver Bell Bunce's
Bachelor Bluff (Appleton, 1883); Don't: A Manual of Mistakes by "A Censor" (also Appleton,
1883); Thackeray's Complete Poems (White, Stokes & Allen, 1884); and Whittier's Saint
Gregory's Guest (Houghton Mifflin, 1886).
Illustrated by Piet Schreuders in Paperbacks U.S.A.: A Graphic History, 1939-1959
(1981), p. 167 (on a 1947 printing), and cited by Richard Layman in Dashiell Hammett: A
Descriptive Bibliography (1979), entry A3.3a (fourth printing, February 1945). Schreuders
also comments on paperback jackets on pp. 27, 52, 85-86, 115-116, and elsewhere. A list of
paperbacks with jackets (from five publishers) is offered by Peter Manesis in "Cover Up!",
Paperback Quarterly, 4.1 (Spring 1981), 26-30 (see pp. 28-29, including illustrations), supplemented
by letters from Bill Lyles and Bob Briney, 4.2 (Summer 1981), 52, and from
Daniel Gobbett, 4.3 (Fall 1981), 50 (mentioning additional publishers, including two British
ones, Hutchson and Guild Books). See also Bill Crider and Billy C. Lee, "Some Notes on
Movie Editions," Paperback Quarterly, 2.1 (Spring 1979), 29-36 (esp. p. 32); Thomas L.
Bonn, Under Cover: An Illustrated History of the American Mass Market Paperbacks (1982),
pp. 26-27, 99-100; Moe Wadle, The Movie Tie-In Book (1994); and Gary Lovisi, "Collecting
and Dealing in Paperback Books," AB Bookman's Weekly, 103 (11 January 1999), 57-60
(see p. 58).
That jackets might actually be useful in cataloguing is shown by Emma Stribling
Dendy in The Utility of Book Jackets in Subject Cataloging (Master's thesis, University of
North Carolina, 1956). Other library-school theses have dealt with the role of jackets in
book circulation: examples are Deborah K. Smith, Check-Out Rates of Books with Book
Jackets versus Books without Book Jackets (University of Wyoming, 1989), and Marian F.
West, Putting on a Good Front: The Impact of Book Cover Design on Circulation
(University
of Central Arkansas, 1992).
An example of a website reporting the jackets in a special collection is "Vietnam
War Literature Collection Dust Jackets," listing 245 jackets in the Special Collections Department
of the University of Delaware Library, available through the Library's website
(<http://www.lib.udel.edu>). The New York Public Library Digital Gallery site (<http://
digitalgallery.nypl.org>) includes "Dust Jackets from American and European Books,
1926-1947," containing over two thousand jackets that NYPL librarians saved from the
routine destruction to which most jackets were consigned by the Library.
Tibbetts's comment prefaces his list of nineteenth-century jackets in Serif, 10.2
(Summer 1973), 42. The offer of the Leach collection was reported by Kevin Mac Donnell
(the dealer who made the offer) on ExLibris (see note 72 above), 22 April 2005. Ringer's
concern for jackets was mentioned in Publishers' Weekly, 215 (20 February 1978), 29-30.
The detailed results of Struik's survey are reported in the Quaerendo article cited
in note 29 above. Among his observations is surprise that copyright-deposit libraries have
no regulations about the retention and description of jackets.
At the conference mentioned in the next paragraph, there were reports on the
history of the handling of jackets in four libraries, by Stephen Bury (British Library), Julie
Ann Lambert (Bodleian), David McKitterick (Cambridge University Library), and Rowan
Watson (Victoria & Albert). These talks dramatically showed how the practices have varied
over the years in each of these libraries and have resulted in posing obstacles for scholars.
Organized by Philip Errington and Warwick Gould, the conference was called
"Dust-Jackets: The Fate and State of Removable Dust-Jackets" and consisted of talks by
Brian Alderson, R. A. Gekoski, Alan Powers, Colin Smythe, and me, as well as the four
reports mentioned in the preceding note. A thorough account of this conference is
provided by Julian Rota in Antiquarian Booksellers' Association Newsletter, 333 (AugustSeptember
2005).
I have elaborated this point in many places, such as the three essays reprinted in
part II of my Literature and Artifacts (1998)—"Reproductions and Scholarship," "The
Latest Forms of Book-Burning," and "The Future of Primary Records"—and in "The
Librarians' Double-Cross," Raritan, 21.4 (Spring 2002), 245-263 (reviewing Nicholson Baker's
2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper).
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