 | Notes on Recent Work in
Descriptive Bibliography |  |
Jackets
My comments on the rationale and procedure for including dust-
jacket
descriptions in a descriptive bibliography were first published as
the third
section (pp. 109–115) of "Book-Jackets, Blurbs, and Bibliogra-
phers" in The Library, 5th ser., 26 (1971), 91–134; they were
supplemented
on pp. 58–60 of "Dust-Jackets, Dealers, and Documentation" in Studies
in Bibliography, 56 (for 2003–04 [2006]), 45–140.
These discussions were
reprinted, with slight revisions, in my Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms,
andUse (2011), pp. 24–30 and 43–46.
Two recent descriptive bibliogra-
phies that can be singled out for their careful
descriptions (and photo-
graphs) of jackets are David
Supino's
Henry James
(2006, 2014) and
David
Alan Richards's
Kipling (2010). For others, see "Introduction to the
Field"
above, showing that jackets are now receiving much more attention
than
they once did. Another indication is Paola
Puglisi's
Sopraccoperta (2003);
and in 2016 Mark
R. Godburn published Nineteenth-Century
Dust-Jackets,
a narrative history that contains many more illustrations of
nineteenth-
century jackets than I provided and deals more fully than I did with
con-
tinental Europe and with unprinted jackets. Among the kinds of boxes
in
which books have been published are those that take shapes related to
the
subject matter of the books. Eugene Umberger has recently studied
this
phenomenon by writing about books on tobacco housed in such forms
as
cigar or cigarette boxes (see "Detachable Book Coverings (That
Aren't
Dust-Jackets)," The Book Collector, 65 [2016],
91–98).
My 2011 book includes a list of almost 2000 examples of pre-1901 Brit-
ish and
American publishers' book-jackets, boxes (slip-cases, boxes with
lids, etc.), and
other detachable coverings for books (such as envelopes or
overall wrappings). It
is limited to items that have printed text or deco-
ration on them, and the bulk
of the entries give some indication of the
extent and nature ofthe printed matter.
My list was not intended to be
a census but simply to report the examples I had
learned about during the
previous four decades. It is extensive enough, however,
to give an idea
of the growth in the use of book-jackets during the nineteenth
century.
consult it as an initial indication of which publishers were using jackets at
a given time, and for what kind of books, as a way of gauging whether the
particular books they are describing were likely to have been published
in jackets or boxes. If any of those books themselves happen to be pres-
ent in my list, the bibliographer will thenknow where to find a copy in a
jacket or box (when my source was an institutional library) or at least can
be sure that a jacket or box once existed (when my source was a dealer's
catalogue or private collection).
Since the publication of my book, a large number of additional ex-
amples have
been reported tome (and some further ones are listed in the
appendixes to
Godburn's book); I hope that they will eventually form a
supplementary list posted
on the website of the Bibliographical Society
of the University of Virginia, thus
increasing the body of evidence on
which bibliographers can draw. The University
of Virginia Library itself
now holds by far the largest collection of pre-1901
jackets: in 2014 it pur-
chased the collection of the dealer Tom Congalton (the
largest collection
reported in my book), and two years later it bought the second
collection
that Congalton formed, bringing the total of its holdings to well
overa
thousand volumes. Every bibliographer who is describing a book from
the
1830s onward (or indeed one ofthe annuals or children's books from
the
preceding decades) should make an effort to find out whether it
originally
appeared in a jacket or box and, if so, to locate such a copy.
| Notes on Recent Work in
Descriptive Bibliography | |