Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets by Mark R. Godburn (review)

Prior literature on dust-jackets shows that subject has been under-researched in the past. The most recent monograph of note was Thomas Tanselle’s Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use, in 2011 (reviewed in The Library, vii, 14 (2013), 229–30). In his book, Godburn examines the origins of dust-jackets in Chapter 1, with Chapter 2 devoted to sealed wrappings. It is striking to read about the extant examples for The Poetical Works of the Late Richard Gedney (1857), with illustrations (figs 12–13) of the printed wrappings made for this work in two colours, blue and salmon. Chapter 3 looks at early flap-style jackets; it is particularly useful to read about books with surviving dust-jackets, published in Germany. Also noteworthy is the slip-case design for The Youth’s Instructor in Natural History (1832) (p. 67). This shows the slip-case divided into three, with orange paper above and below the white central paper band on which the title has been printed. These elements bear a striking similarity to the design with three horizontal bands which appeared on the front covers of Penguin paperbacks in the 1930s, showing that nothing is ever as new or original as might be thought by those who created designs.

Godburn examines the John Murray / Smith Elder ‘file copy’ archive, ‘only recently brought to light’. In the first footnote to Appendix One, we are informed that ‘[Bertram] Rota handled the sale of the archive to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’. The sale probably took place by the mid 1980s. That this archive has been researched only recently shows how long it has taken for the significance of its dust-jackets to be appreciated. Possibly, the knowledge of this collection came after Tanselle published his recent work on book-jackets. There are quite extensive passages in Chapters 4 and 6 about the 216 examples of dust-jackets that survive in this archive, out of a total collection of 8,600 books.

Godburn has ensured that ten illustrations are made of these, some of which show several titles, both with and without their dust-jackets. Appendix 1 cites these titles published before 1900, of which twenty-two were listed by Tanselle in 2011. It appears that the majority of the dust-jackets had plain covers, with no more than title and imprint on the spines. Examples of decoration on the upper cover of a wrapper do appear, as for the dust-jacket on The Funeral Tent of an Egyptian Queen (1882; fig. 67), which has the same decoration printed on the spine and upper covers as is blocked in gold on the green cloth of the binding case. The natural-history books (fig. 39, p. 76) published in the 1860s and 1870s, illustrated by Benjamin Fawcett, were probably issued in decorated cloth covers made in Fawcett’s own bindery. The volumes of A History of the Fishes of the British Islands have dust-jackets with matching decoration to those blocked on the covers, and they offer the opportunity to speculate on the medium used for the printing of the dust-jackets. Were the dust-jackets produced from woodblocks, or possibly from stereotypes, or even electrotypes?

Later in Chapter 4, the matter of stationers’ dust-jackets made by companies in the United Kingdom and in the United States of America is discussed. From the 1870s at least, it is quite clear that mass manufacturing of these was undertaken to protect books used by book clubs, lending libraries, schools and societies. This description removes any impression that might have been gained from earlier chapters that dust-jackets were created as an exceptional matter, rather than commonplace.

For Lewis Carroll’s ‘Paper Wrappers’ (Chapter 5), Godburn weaves some unpublished letters regarding dust-jackets between Carroll and his publisher Macmillan into the longer narrative of...