The May
2019 meeting covered dust jackets. Not
literally. The group did not sit around putting protective covers over dust jackets. The topic was Interesting
Dust Jackets and Their Stories. Some
books were shown because the collector liked the artwork or design of the
jacket. Other examples were shown because
the art or design conveyed a scene, image, or concept central to the
story. Some showed points of issue
between different editions of the same title, while others highlighted stories
about the history of the artwork or printing of a particular jacket. The nuance among the respective interpretations
of the theme created a wide variety of books and dust jackets shown,
making each story all the more interesting.
Several collectors also brought books about dust jackets, which included
information about, and photographs of, several of the jackets shown at the
meeting.
Modern
Literature
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| Time and Again. First edition (left) and Book-of-the-Month Club edition (right). |
Finney, Jack. Time
and Again. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1970. Together with the
Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC) edition published the same year. First editions in a dust jacket are hard to
find in fine condition. The first
edition and the BOMC editions are extremely similar but there are several points
of issue differentiating the editions.
On the book itself, both editions have the publishers' tinted top edge
and mustard end papers (later BOMC are white).
The BOMC has the blind stamp to the rear book board, making the actual
volume easy to spot. It is the jacket
that confuses, but several points distinguish the two. First, both editions have the $7.95 price on
the lower front flap, and both have the same photo on the front flap of an
overhead train and a horse drawn trolley below it; but the editions have variant
front flap verbiage wrapping around the photo.
The first edition states, "Fifth Avenue from 34th to 14th - is
enchanted" while the BOMC states, "Broadway from 23rd to 8th - is
enchanted by." Second, the first
edition has the numeric code #20497 on rear lower jacket panel, while the BOMC
shows #1521. Third, the BOMC also states
in red on the front flap "BOMC Selection."
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| Front flap of both editions, showing points of issue |
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| The Great Gatsby |
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The
Great Gatsby. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1925. First
edition in a facsimile dust jacket. This dust jacket is one of the greatest dust
jackets ever designed and is now quite rare and very expensive since few have
survived. The original printing of the
book in 1925 was 20,870 copies, but when one comes on the market with an
original dust jacket the bidding can go well over $100,000. The dust jacket has an interesting story
behind it, as an unusual case where the dust jacket art influenced the final
version of a classic book. Fitzgerald's
editor at Scribner's, the legendary Max Perkins, commissioned the jacket art
seven months before Fitzgerald finished writing the book. The author was so taken with the image of the
eyes when he first saw the artwork, he wrote to his editor saying, "For
Christ's sake don't give anyone that jacket, I've written it into the
book."
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| Orient Express |
Greene, Graham. Orient
Express. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
Doran & Company, Inc., 1933.
First American edition, alternately titled, of Stamboul Train. Only 4,334
copies sold. In addition to age and the
small first printing, the dust jacket is rare, in part, because it was often
removed in order to display the decorative binding with the train and tracks
curving from the spine around to the front cover. Also, book dealers later misidentified the
images on the dust jacket as stills from the 1934 film adaptation and concluded
it could not be an original jacket; a modified version of the jacket was used
for the 1933 Grosset & Dunlop and the 1942 Sun Dial Press reprints. The photos for the Doubleday Doran jacket
design were, in fact, created specifically for this purpose; the same
period-style photomontage design was also used for the first American edition
of Greene's next novel, It's a
Battlefield, the following year.
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| View of full dust jacket |
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| The Ministry of Fear |
Greene, Graham. The
Ministry of Fear. London: William
Heinemann, Ltd., 1943. Published in
1943, the first edition was printed in compliance with the 1942 Book Production
War Economy Agreement, a set of standards set by the Ministry of Supply and the
Publishers Association during wartime.
The guidelines sought to conserve paper during war rationing by
regulating paper size, words per page, blank pages, paper quality, and other
factors. Dust jackets were often printed
on the backs of unused jacket stock of other titles, some of which were quite
old. This diminished the quality of the paper
causing many jackets to deteriorate quickly.
On some jackets, the darker printing on the verso of a jacket showed
through the paper, making them undesirable.
Because wartime jackets either fell apart more easily or because they
were quickly discarded, many have become scarce. The verso of the jackets for The Ministry of Fear included such
titles as J. B. Priestley's Faraway
(1932), Margery Allingham's Traitor's
Purse (1941) [noted in Author Price Guides], and Burton Hendrick's The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page
(1923). This copy shows Priestley's Faraway on the verso.
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| View of full dust jacket with previously-published jacket on verso |
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| Shoeless Joe |
Kinsella, W. P. Shoeless
Joe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. The dust jacket elements reflect many aspects
of the story about the beauty and history of baseball: the corn field and the
ghostly ball player framed by a baseball diamond. The basis for the film
adaptation Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe is one of the great
baseball novels.
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| The Things They Carried |
O'Brien, Tim. The
Things They Carried. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1990. What is
striking about this dust jacket is its starkness, reflecting the stories it
tells about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the
Vietnam War. The title and author in large, bold sans serif over a black
background indicate a straightforward tale of darkness.
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| Nineteen Eighty-Four |
Orwell, George. Nineteen
Eighty-Four. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Company, 1949. Book club
edition, but identical to the first American edition. The simplicity of the dust jacket design,
with the title depicting a torn newspaper headline, visually references
newspeak, one of the invented terms or concepts in the book. Like newspeak, many of Nineteen Eighty-Four's terms and concepts, such as doublethink,
thoughtcrime, memory hole, and Big Brother have entered common English usage
since its publication in 1949. The novel
also popularized the adjective Orwellian, to connote such things as official
deception, secret surveillance, misleading terminology, and the manipulation of
recorded history by a totalitarian or authoritarian state, as described by the
author.
Book
about Dust Jackets
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| Classic Book Jackets |
Hansen, Thomas S., Classic Book Jackets: The Design Legacy of George Salter. New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
2005. Hansen provides an overview of
the life and work of George Salter, a pioneer in cover art and design who
helped revolutionize the role of the dust jacket and created some of the most
iconic book covers in modern literature.
The book is a comprehensive guide to Salter's book covers and includes
218 full-color images of his book jackets, original concepts, and
sketches. It includes two appendices
detailing Salter's designs for the German book market (1922-1934) and the
American book market (1934-1967).
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| Front Cover |
Powers, Alan. Front
Cover: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design.
London: Mitchell Beazley, 2001.
144 pages with 300 full-color images of book jackets and covers,
including hardbacks, paperbacks, and wraparound paper covers. Powers provides the historical context of and
evolution of dust jackets in the twentieth century, dividing them into four
categories: the impact of modernism (1920s and 1930s), the creation of style
(1940s through 1960s), a revolution in print (1960s and 1970s), and design in
the digital age (1980s and 1990s).
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| Sample page of Front Cover |
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| Bradbury: An Illustrated Life |
Weist, Jerry. Bradbury:
An Illustrated Life, A Journey to Far Metaphor. New York: William Morrow and Co., 2002. With an Introduction by Ray Bradbury. Weist provides a "visual biography"
of the life and work of Bradbury, including his influence in publishing, radio,
theatre, and film. Full-color images
illustrate the biography, including the jacket art for nearly 50 years of
hardcover and paperback books, along with descriptions and explanations of the
artwork.
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| Sample page of Bradbury: An Illustrated Life |
