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Part I: The first detachable covers

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many books were issued in temporary bindings of paper wraps or plainly covered boards. These bindings were intended to protect the folded and gathered sheets (the text blocks of books) until they were permanently bound. The usual practice was for customers to have the original bindings removed after purchase and replaced with custom bindings of their own choice.

Dust jackets are not known to have been issued on temporary bindings. It has always been assumed that these bindings did not need protection, although many of them were never replaced and ended up as permanent covers. If publishers issued jackets for such bindings, none are known to have survived.

Early sheaths and boxes

The earliest known detachable covers issued on bound books were pasteboard sheaths. These small boxes appeared on pocket annuals and almanacs in America, Britain and Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth century (plate 1). Not many sheaths have survived from before 1800, although their wide geographic spread suggests that they were in common use by the 1790s and probably by the 1780s.

[Left PLATE 1. Repository of Useful Information. Philadelphia: Benjamin Davies, 1795. Pocket almanac with dated sheath. Right PLATE 2. Wallis’s New Game of Universal History and Chronology. London: Wallis & Son, 1814. Pocket volume with color sheath. David Levy collection]

Sheaths were very common after the turn of the century, not only on annuals and almanacs but also to hold children’s doll-dressing kits and booklets, folding maps and charts, and books of rules for card games, most famously Hoyle’s. The height of their use was probably on literary annuals in the 1820s and thirties. Sheaths are often loosely referred to as “the first dust jackets,” although their only resemblance to jackets is that they provided detachable protection.

Sheaths opened on one or both ends, sometimes with thumb cutouts to facilitate removal of the book. They were often issued with a printed label or were covered with decorated paper (plate 2). Sheaths could be carried in a purse or pocket, lay flat on a table or stand upright on a shelf.

[PLATE 3. Stuttgart: 1823-26. Works of Friedrich Schiller in 16 volumes issued in a much larger box than is usually found in this period. Author’s collection]

Larger boxes for multi-volume sets are known after the turn of the century (plate 3). Most surviving examples are for sets of small or miniature books. (A full treatment of boxes will be in Part VI.)

Jackets for unbound sheets

Large numbers of books were sold as unbound sheets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to customers (individuals, wholesalers, booksellers, lending libraries and other publishers) who had them bound to their own taste and needs. Sheets that did not receive temporary bindings probably would have needed some other form of protection until they were permanently bound, if only plain wrapping paper to keep them in good order while in storage or when they were being shipped or marketed. It was long unknown whether publishers might have issued some sort of specifically printed loose paper “jackets” for unbound sheets.

Then in 2008, such a jacket came to light. It had been issued to protect, identify and perhaps even help market the unbound sheets of an octavo book published in Germany in 1796. Normally such a jacket or wrapping would have been discarded when the sheets were bound, but in this case the sheets had never been bound and the jacket survived. Made of thin paper (a little heavier than tissue paper), it completely enclosed the sheets and was printed with the book’s title, author, illustrator and other information (plate 4). The printing was done in an attractive manner, suggesting that the jacket might have had a marketing role (to attract customers) as well as a protective one. Prices are penciled on its front panel, suggesting that the sheets were marketed in this wrapping.

[PLATE 4. Leipzig, 1796. A printed jacket for unbound sheets of text and engravings which were intended to be bound into German, French or English editions of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or as a stand-alone book. Showing the title page of the folded text sheets, and the unfolded engraving sheets beneath them. The penciled prices are 40M (marks?) for the text sheets, 360M for the engravings, and 400M total. University of Pennsylvania.]

[PLATE 5. Comparison of the 1796 Clarissa jacket for unbound sheets and an 1857 jacket from a bound book, The Poetical Works of the Late Richard S. Gedney. They are virtually identical. University of Pennsylvania and Lilly Library]


[PLATE 6. Philadelphia, 1791. Time: An Apparition of Eternity. Front and back of unbound pamphlet and its printed jacket (shown out of scale) which wrapped around all four sides and was sealed with wax. Lilly Library]

One other jacket for sheets is known. It was issued as a loose cover for the unbound sheets of a small pamphlet published in Philadelphia in 1791 by Zachariah Poulson (plate 6). The pamphlet was called Time: An Apparition of Eternity, by John William Gerar de Brahm. The jacket was made of heavy parchment paper, and like the 1796 German example, it completely enclosed the sheets. It was also printed, in this case with a long appeal to potential customers—a clear marketing role—and was hand signed by the author. The printing on this wrapping might almost be called a “blurb,” a type of marketing that would not become common on dust jackets until the twentieth century. The wrapping folded around all four sides of the sheets and was sealed with wax.

These are the only known examples of detachable jackets issued for unbound sheets either before or after 1800, but their existence on both sides of the Atlantic, like the wide geographic spread of early sheaths, suggests a wider use. It would be fair to guess that jackets for sheets were issued with some regularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps particularly for individual gatherings of sheets that were earmarked for direct retail sale, as opposed to those that were being sent in bulk to a bindery or to a wholesale customer. Publishers often copied one another’s innovations, and many firms must have realized that loosely wrapped printed covers provided a simpler and less expensive way to protect, identify, ship and market their unbound sheets than binding them in paper wraps or other, more costly, temporary bindings. However often such jackets were issued, they would seem to have a more natural claim to the title of “the first dust jackets” issued by publishers than the pasteboard sheaths in use at that time.

Homemade jackets

Many book owners made their own jackets, especially for books that received heavy wear such as text books, law books and the like. A surprising number of homemade jackets survive today, enough to show that they were common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that there were more book owners at that time who wanted the protection of jackets for their bindings than we realize today.

Virtually all homemade jackets are of the common flap style which covered the binding and left the text block exposed. Examples of such jackets are recorded from the early eighteenth century, and they were probably made decades if not centuries earlier than that. They were often crudely made, usually of paper, cloth or leather, or from any material that was at hand, including wallpaper and animal fur of varying parentage. They seem to have been made as often with three flaps at each end (called “french flaps”) as with single flaps. Their makers were often quite determined that the jackets would remain on their books, sometimes going so far as to glue the flaps to the endpapers or the entire jacket directly to the binding—protecting and damaging it at the same time. Often the flaps of homemade jackets were sewn together to keep the jacket in place, and they are sometimes found today with the original thread or twine still performing that function.

Homemade jackets were added to the circulating stock of at least one lending library in the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company in Philadelphia. Founded in 1731, this was the first successful lending library in the American colonies. The library’s first books were ordered from England and arrived in the fall of 1731. Before the first winter was out, a need was perceived for jackets for the books, and in a meeting in January, 1732, the directors of the company ordered that “the Books of the Library should be covered with sheathing Paper & … Stephen Potts should be spoke to, to do it, for Preservation of the Binding.” Potts was a friend of Franklin’s and the library’s binder.

Given Franklin’s genius for practical Yankee inventions, one might naturally wonder whether he was the guiding light behind the use of protective jackets for bindings if the concept wasn’t already well known by the 1730s.

[PLATE 7. Part of a jacket (front panel and flaps) made for the circulating library of Glazier, Masters & Co. of Hallowell, Maine. Printed on coarse paper. Printing includes fees, rules and copyright date of October, 1828. Author's collection.]

In any event, by the early decades of the nineteenth century, with dust jackets being made for lending library and privately owned books, sheaths and other boxes in wide use and printed jackets appearing to some extent on unbound sheets, there was plenty of precedence, if not yet a real need, for publishers to issue dust jackets on bound books. The need would be provided by two important developments in the publishing industry in the 1820s.

Part II: Sealed wrapping dust jackets

Two events occurred in the publishing industry in the 1820s which are thought to have provided the direct motive for the appearance of publishers’ jackets on bound books. One was the introduction of case bindings, the other the appearance of the first literary annuals.

Case bindings

Case binding was introduced in London by the publisher William Pickering in the early 1820s. This was a partially mechanized method of binding books in which the bindings were made in one piece, stamped with lettering and decoration, then attached to text blocks, usually by adhesion to the endpapers. This was faster and more exact than the old method of attaching boards to text blocks, sewing or gluing covers to them, then decorating the covers one at a time by hand. The new method made possible the concept of “edition binding,” whereby large batches of identical bindings—usually cloth but also leather or paper covered boards—could be run off for individual titles. At first these bindings were about as plain as the temporary publishers’ bindings that had preceded them, but by the 1830s and forties case bindings were becoming increasingly attractive as new methods were devised for decorating them in color and gold leaf. This was the beginning of a golden age of decorative publishers’ bookbinding that would last for the rest of the century and beyond.

One result of this innovation was that original publishers’ bindings now came to be regarded as permanent. No longer was it necessary to have a temporary binding replaced with fine leather if one wanted an attractive and durable binding, although some book owners who still preferred and could afford custom leather would have case bindings systematically removed from their books throughout the nineteenth century. And publishers would continue to sell significant portions of their stock as unbound sheets which purchasers would then have custom bound. But for the masses of people in Britain, Europe and America who were becoming book owners for the first time thanks to the spread of literacy and better wages in the Industrial Age, edition bindings made by the case binding process were durable, affordable, attractive and permanent. Because they were attractive and permanent, publishers at some point began to cover these bindings with protective jackets.

Literary annuals

The second great innovation of the 1820s, the introduction of literary annuals, also got its start in London. Rudolph Ackermann, a German emigre who had noted the popularity of annuals like the Tannenbaum on the continent, introduced the first literary annual to England in the fall of 1822, the Forget-Me-Not for 1823. It was an immediate hit. It was followed the next year by Friendship’s Offering, and soon by dozens and then hundreds of other annuals in Britain, Europe and the United States. Millions of annuals were sold over the next several decades before the craze for these “gift books,” as they were called, ended around 1860.

Literary annuals were marketed to middle and upper class women. They came out late each fall for the following year and were often given as Christmas presents. They carried poetry and prose by popular authors like Mary Shelley and Samuel Coleridge, woodcut illustrations and the latest in women’s fashions. They were often pocket-sized like the earlier annuals and almanacs that had appeared in sheaths, so that women could carry them in their reticules. Many literary annuals of the 1820s and thirties were bound in paper covered boards and were also issued with sheaths which were typically decorated with glazed paper, often printed in color like the bindings (plate 10).

[PLATE 10. Forget-Me-Not for 1829. London: Ackermann & Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1828. Binding of green glazed paper boards with similarly covered sheath. Issued in paper boards and sheath from its first year, the binding of the Forget-Me-Not was upgraded to watered silk by the end of the decade, and its detachable sheath was discontinued soon thereafter. The book probably was issued in a sealed wrapping jacket at that point, although no example is recorded. It is likely that large numbers of annuals were issued with sealed wrapping jackets from the 1820s through the 1850s, but virtually all of them would have been discarded when they were torn open, leaving only a few scattered survivors today. Sheaths, on the other hand, are common today because they were meant to be saved and reused. Peter Harrington Bookseller, London]

The competition among annuals was great, and publishers were constantly trying to improve their content and appearance. Before the 1820s were over, many firms had begun to replace the cheap and easily worn bindings of paper boards that had been issued on many of the early annuals with more substantial and elegant bindings like watered silk and embossed leather. Some publishers continued to issue sheaths with the new bindings—both The Amulet for 1828 in purple silk and the Forget-Me-Not for 1830 in crimson silk had sheaths, for example—but over time the sheaths were phased out too. The Forget-Me-Not stopped using sheaths in 1831: as an article in The Gentleman’s Magazine explained, such protection was “no longer necessary” for bindings like watered silk. Many other publishers must have followed suit because surviving sheaths today are mostly found on annuals bound in paper boards and less often on those bound in silk, decorated cloth or leather.

But if sheaths were no longer needed for the long term protection of annuals in paper boards, dust jackets were now called for to protect the elegant new cloth and leather casings.

The first jackets on bound books

The earliest known dust jacket issued by a publisher on a bound book appeared in the fall of 1829 on an English literary annual called Friendship’s Offering for 1830. This jacket was a “sealed wrapping,” one of the two major types of dust jackets issued by publishers in the nineteenth century. (The other was the common flap style, already widely used for homemade jackets by the 1820s but not yet known in publisher production. See Part III.)

Sealed wrappings were simply large rectangular pieces of paper without flaps which folded around all four sides of a book like wrapping paper, completely enclosing it. The overlapping portions were sealed together with wax (plate 8), or in later cases with glue. This is essentially the same type of jacket or wrapping that was issued to an unknown extent with unbound sheets in the eighteenth century.

PLATE 8. Detail of the sealed wrapping jacket for Friendship’s Offering for 1830. The words “Forget me not!” in the publisher’s verse were probably intended as a pun aimed at another annual, Rudolph Ackermann’s Forget-Me-Not, which had started the fad for literary annuals in 1823. Bodleian Library, Oxford University.

But while these jackets resembled wrapping paper in their form and method of use, they were far from being the coarse plain wrappers of popular lore which constitute the general misconception of nineteenth century dust jackets. The Friendship’s Offering jacket was made from a good grade of cream wove paper, and it was printed with text and fancy decorative borders that appeared over both panels, the spine and the long side of the text block. The jacket had advertisements for other books and prints, including prices, and even a short verse of four lines which also appeared inside the book, a sort of poetical publisher’s blurb to prospective buyers of the Romantic Era—not bad for a dust jacket from 1829.

[PLATE 9. Full image of the sealed wrapping jacket for Friendship’s Offering. Oddly enough, while only the book but not the jacket survives for the 1833 Keepsake, the opposite is true for Friendship’s Offering, for which the jacket survives but not the book. The jacket was purchased without the book by Oxford University at an auction in 1877, having been bound up with other booktrade ephemera by a Yorkshire fellmonger and antiquary named Gillyatt Sumner (1793-1875) who collected old deeds, mortgages and advertising paper. It was probably the advertising on the Friendship’s Offering jacket that caught Sumner’s eye, and he evidently discarded the book when he had the jacket bound up. The loss of the book itself is lamentable, but the jacket was beautifully preserved. It lay all but forgotten in the Bodleian’s pamphlets collection until the 1970s, when it was discovered by curator Michael Turner. The binding of the book was apparently embossed leather, judging from other surviving copies. NOTE: The heavy fold mark down the center of the jacket, plus the two fold marks across the center and lower third, as well as the fold marks and pin holes down the left side, are all a result of the Sumner binding, and are not from the original wrapping of the jacket around the book. Bodleian Library, Oxford University.]

The bookman, bibliographer and author John Carter, who in 1934 announced what was then the earliest known jacket on a bound book (issued on another English annual in 1832), surmised that it was the appearance of watered silk bindings on English annuals that “provided the motive for the evolution of the dust-wrapper.”

When Carter made that statement (in Publishers Weekly, 22 September 1934, p. 1121), the loose printed wrappings issued on unbound sheets in the 1790s had not yet come to light, so there was no consideration of their role in the evolution of publishers’ jackets. And since he made it, only one earlier jacket on a bound book has been recorded (on the 1830/29 Friendship’s Offering). Carter was careful to note that “Annuals as a class always stood slightly apart from the general habits of contemporary publishing, so that one generalizes from them with caution,” but the evidence gathered since 1934 does not change the probability that he was correct. If the introduction of high quality publishers’ casings on English annuals was not the factor that caused dust jackets to be issued on bound books for the first time, it must have at least widened their use.

The lost Keepsake

The book that Carter found in jacket was an 1833 copy of The Keepsake (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1832), one of the most popular English annuals of its day (plate 11). The binding was crimson watered silk with gilt lettering on the spine, and the jacket was a sealed wrapping. It survived because the original owner refashioned it into a flap-style jacket after opening it and kept it on the book instead of throwing it away, a practice that may have been fairly common.

[PLATE 11. The sealed wrapping jacket for the 1833 Keepsake. This jacket was saved when its owner refashioned it into a flap-style jacket instead of throwing it out after breaking the seal. The darker area on the jacket shows how it sat on the book for one hundred years after being reconfigured. The Keepsake also carried imprints of French and German publishers and was likely distributed in jacket in all three countries. However, although the Keepsake was published from 1828 to 1857 with tens of thousands of copies sold in that time, John Carter’s example is the only one that has ever come to light in jacket. Bodleian Library, Oxford University]

From the moment Carter reported the existence of this book in 1934, it has held a position of prominence and mystery in the realm of nineteenth century books. At the time, the jacket was a remarkable twenty-eight years older than the previous oldest known jacket (a flap-style jacket from 1860 which had also been reported by Carter). For the rest of the twentieth century, no other verified jacket would come within a decade of being as early. And in an amazing coincidence, a contemporary calling card was affixed to the front pastedown of the book with the name of “Mrs. Carter” on it (plate 12). She evidently was the original owner but of no known relation to John Carter (email from Carter’s nephew).

[PLATE 12. Calling card of Mrs. Carter on the endpaper of the 1833 Keepsake. She may have been the person who refashioned the sealed wrapping jacket into a flap-style jacket; one of those flaps kept one side of her calling card clean for the next 118 years until the jacket was lost in 1951. Bodleian Library, Oxford University]

In 1951, Carter brought the Keepsake to Oxford University where he showed it to a meeting of the recently formed Society of Bibliophiles at the Bodleian Library. Carter stayed at All Souls with John Sparrow, one of the founders of the bibliophiles. It was just a short walk to the Bodley, but somehow the Keepsake jacket was lost during Carter’s visit, and it has never been seen since. Whether it was misplaced, accidentally discarded or even stolen is not known. Carter himself did not know what happened to it (he reported the loss in a cryptic footnote in Books and Book-Collectors, 1956). Fortunately, he had made a photograph of the jacket, so at least its image survives for posterity. The book itself survives as part of the Carter collection of nineteenth century bindings at the Bodley. An examination of the book shows that half of Mrs. Carter’s card on the endpaper is soiled, and the other half is clean, having been protected by one of the flaps of the reconfigured jacket.

For seventy-five years the Keepsake reigned as the earliest recorded dust jacket issued on any English, European or American book until the Friendship’s Offering jacket came to light at Oxford in 2009. Ironically, the existence of the earlier jacket was reported during a search for the lost Keepsake. For now, these two titles are the only verified examples of publishers’ dust jackets issued on bound books prior to the 1840s. It is scant evidence from which to build theories about their origin and use.

Like Friendship’s Offering, the Keepsake jacket was printed with decorative borders and with ads for prints and other books—including a forthcoming title. Such farsighted advertising—or any advertising at all—is unexpected on jackets this early. It is not known how often sealed wrapping jackets were issued in the 1820s and thirties, or whether they were issued only on literary annuals, but the sophistication of these two jackets and their similarily in design elements and printing certainly suggests a wider use. Given how much publishers copied one another’s innovations generally—and the use of sheaths on annuals in particular—it is highly likely that they copied each other in the use of jackets as well. The competitive marketplace for annuals would have virtually required it. But with only two surviving examples from the first third of the century, and no known publishers’ records on the subject until the last third of the century, it is impossible to say for sure. The Keepsake appeared in watered silk from its introduction in 1827, and it was very likely issued in jacket from that year. Friendship’s Offering began in paper covered boards and sheath in 1824; the binding was changed to embossed leather in 1828 and was probably issued with a jacket at that time.

Sealed wrappings in the 1840s

Sealed wrappings were probably as common on annuals issued in silk, cloth and leather as sheaths were on those issued in paper boards—which is to say, very common. However, after Friendship’s Offering and the Keepsake, there is only one other title recorded in a sealed wrapping jacket before 1850, The Juvenile Scrap-Book, by Sarah Stickney Ellis (London: Fisher, Son, & Co.). But while Friendship’s Offering and the Keepsake are known only in single examples of the jacket, there are five recorded copies of the jacket for The Juvenile Scrap-Book from five different years, 1845 and 1847-50 (each issued in the preceding year).

Such a run provides an opportunity to compare the jackets from year to year, and there is one notable difference. Mrs. Ellis’s name appears only as the author of “The Women of England” on the 1845 jacket, while her name is given as “Mrs. Ellis” on the 1847 jacket. And if nothing else, this run of jackets shows that at least some publishers were issuing jackets regularly and systematically by this time. One assumes that annuals like the Keepsake and Friendship’s Offering were issued in jackets every year of their existence, but with only single examples recorded for each title out of tens of thousands of copies printed over several decades, there is room for doubt about whether jackets were issued every year or only sporadically in some cases. Publishers of this period were experimenting not only with bookbinding but with protective devices such as sheaths, slipcases, multi-volume boxes, sealed wrappings and, at some point, flap-style jackets. It is possible that some annuals were issued in sheaths one year, sealed wrappings the next, and neither the year after that. Unfortunately, no written records have ever been found in any publisher’s archive which discuss the use of dust jackets or show orders for paper and printing for jackets. What little is known about dust jackets before 1850 is based solely on the handful of surviving examples.

The existence of five jacketed copies of The Juvenile Scrap-Book was first reported in the 1930s in the pages of Publishers Weekly, where John T. Winterich was conducting a long-running inquiry with readers of his column (including John Carter), trying to determine how far back dust jackets went. But only two of the five are located today, the 1845 and ’47 examples. The jackets on these two initially survived because, like the 1833 Keepsake jacket, their owners refashioned them into flap-style jackets instead of throwing them out.

In order to reuse a sealed wrapping jacket as a flap-style jacket, it was necessary to cut and refold the portions that originally overlapped and were sealed outside the book (plates 13 & 14). It was first necessary to open the wrapping very carefully at the wax seals to prevent excessive tearing. Then the jacket had to be realigned over the book so that the paper would extend across both boards with enough left over at each end to make the flaps that would be tucked between the endpapers. The top and bottom portions of the jacket that previously went over the top and bottom of the text block could either be cut off or folded behind the main body of the jacket. The result was a jacket that could stay on the book but whose printing was now badly misaligned over the spine instead of over the boards. There would also be residue of sealing wax on the jacket and probably a tear or two. An owner would have had to badly want the continued protection of the jacket in order to use it in this form.

[PLATE 13. The Juvenile Scrap-Book for 1847. London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1846. A fine example of a decorative case bound annual with its original sealed wrapping jacket which was reconfigured after opening into a flap-style jacket. The fold marks clearly show how the printed area of the jacket, which was originally centered over the front board, had to be realigned over the spine so that flaps could be folded around each board. Compare these uncut flaps to those in Plate 13. UCLA Special Collections]


[PLATE 14. Another reconfigured sealed wrapping, this one on The Juvenile Scrap-Book for 1845 (London, 1844). Note how the printing on the jacket is now misaligned over the spine. The author, Mrs. Ellis, is not identified by name on the 1845 jacket, only as the author of The Women of England. Her name does appear on the 1847 jacket. UCLA Special Collections]


[PLATE 15. Instead of merely folding the paper to make flaps, the owner of the reconfigured 1845 Juvenile Scrap-Book jacket made three bevel-cut flaps on each end and attached them to each other with wax. Such flaps, sometimes called french flaps, evidently were commonly known at this time either from homemade jackets or from other publisher-issued jackets. This volume also has a birthday inscription from father to daughter (Georgina Henrietta Hampden) dated November 15, 1844. “Papa” either inscribed the book after Georgina opened the jacket, or he broke the seal and removed the book himself in order to inscribe it beforehand. The jacket may have been saved not only out of a desire to protect the binding but also from the common impulse to keep all parts of a gift. Gift inscriptions are regularly found in nineteenth century books that still have their dust jackets. UCLA Special Collections]

The 1845 and ’47 jackets were both reconfigured in this way, with one variation. The owner of the 1845 jacket cut three beveled flaps at each end (french flaps) and attached them to each other with wax so that the jacket could not be easily removed from the book (plate 15). This is no doubt what saved the jacket not only during the owner’s lifetime but down to the present day. The owner of the 1847 jacket merely folded the paper around the boards to make single flaps at each end without cutting them or using wax. Clearly there was more than one way to reconfigure a sealed wrapping jacket in the nineteeenth century. The french flap style must have been generally known in the 1840s, either from homemade jackets or publisher-issued jackets—or both.

Of course, it was also possible to reuse sealed wrapping jackets in their original form simply by rewrapping them around the book after each use (again, as long as the jacket hadn’t been destroyed when it was opened). Some book owners no doubt reused them in this way when their books were new and they wanted to protect the binding, but it was cumbersome to reuse sealed wrapping jackets in any shape or form, and sooner or later virtually all of them were discarded. They simply were not made to be reused, and this was still an age when relatively few people wanted their bindings covered on the shelf, especially bindings as attractive as those on annuals after the paper boards period. Like nearly all nineteenth century dust jackets, whether of the sealed wrapping or flap style, even if the jacket managed to survive its first generation of ownership, it was likely to be discarded by a later generation, especially after it became soiled and tattered.

The question arises why did publishers use the sealed wrapping style of jacket in the first place. This style was necessary when it was used with unbound sheets where flaps could not be employed, and the form may have simply evolved onto bound books. The form itself no doubt derived from the common wrapping paper and method used to wrap store goods and other products that were sealed in printed paper, such as the playing cards sold by circulating libraries like Mudies. But sealed wrapping jackets used more paper than flap-style jackets and required more labor to fold and seal. And unlike the flap-style, sealed wrapping jackets had to carry some printing on them, if only enough to identify the book inside. But even with descriptive printing on the jacket such as “highly finished plates” and “elegantly bound,” the main drawback of sealed wrapping jackets was that they made it impossible for potential customers to see the binding or to browse through the pages of the book. For this reason, bookstores may have removed many of these jackets as the books were put out for sale or at least provided unjacketed desk copies so customers could see what they were getting. And it was no doubt for these same reasons—plus the end of the era of annuals—that sealed wrapping jackets eventually fell out of favor with publishers and the public in preference for the simpler, more economical and reusable flap jackets (although it would not be until the twentieth century that book buyers would habitually save and reuse them).

One possible reason for the use of sealed wrapping jackets is that they resembled gift wrapping. Since annuals were classified as gift books, some publishers may have purposely used this type of jacket in order to present customers with gift books that were already gift wrapped. If so, it was a very subtle form of marketing, quite apart from and in addition to the printed advertising that appeared on some of these early jackets. Indeed, this would have been a far more sophisticated use of marketing than nineteenth century dust jackets are given credit for.

Sealed wrapping jackets also provided complete protection for bindings, and of course this was probably the major reason why they were used. Stories are told of London booksellers of the early nineteenth century who had to wrap their unjacketed stock in loose paper to ward off the smoke and soot of the Industrial Age (stated in Rosner, The Growth of the Book-Jacket with no substantiation). This may or may not be true, but literary annuals were expensive books, and publishers and booksellers alike would have wanted their gilded and silken covers to be well protected. The simple fact of completely enclosing these books in jackets would have given them an added air of preciousness and set them apart from the general run of trade books which might not have appeared in jackets at all at that time, or only in the more pedestrian flap jackets.

Perhaps there was an hierarchy in the use of dust jackets in the days before they were universally used: no jackets for cheap temporary bindings, plain flap-style jackets for general trade books, and sealed wrappings or sheaths for annuals and other books in fine cloth or decorative boards. Sheaths (and apparently jackets) were issued with papier mache bindings in the 1840s, for example.

Sealed wrappings on trade books

Sealed wrappings also appeared on trade books although surviving examples are as rare as they are on annuals. Only a handful of trade titles are known in sealed wrappings, all issued after mid century on books published in 1857, 1860, 1869 and 1884. Each of these examples has an ornate binding, as do the surviving examples on annuals, suggesting that sealed wrappings may have been reserved for better bindings generally.

The lastest known example, from 1884, appeared long after the flap-style jacket had become dominant, and it was issued with instructions to cut it open at the indicated lines and reuse it as a flap jacket. This shows not only that the sealed wrapping was by then trying to survive in a world of reusable flap-style jackets, but that the informal practice of refashioning sealed wrappings into flap jackets, which dates back at least as far as the 1833 Keepsake, was well enough known in the book trade to be copied by publishers and may have been widespread.

One of the trade examples, The Poetical Works of the Late Richard S. Gedney (1857), was published with the imprint of three firms, Appleton of New York, Whittaker of London, and Galt of Manchester. Three copies of this title are known in jacket, two of which are still sealed (plates 16 & 17). The jackets are known in two colors, light blue and salmon, and the jackets were color coordinated with the bindings. The light blue jacket was issued over a dark blue binding, the salmon jacket over a red binding. The Gedney Poems also appeared in green cloth which may have had a green jacket, although no example is known. Perhaps each of the three publishers received a specific color of binding and jacket, red, blue or green. In any event, color coordination of jackets and bindings this early, like the printing of advertising and marketing come-ons on jackets from the 1820s and thirties, shows a sophistication of use which again suggests that publishers’ dust jackets may have been more widely issued in the middle third of the nineteenth century than can be proven today.

[PLATE 16. The Poetical Works of the Late Richard S. Gedney. New York: Appleton and Co., London: Whittaker and Co., Manchester: Galt and Co., 1857. A sealed wrapping jacket on a trade binding. The jacket is still sealed. The binding is dark blue with light blue jacket. Author's collection]


[PLATE 17. Another copy of the Gedney Poems in salmon jacket and red binding. Southern Methodist University]

There are also sealed wrapping jackets on two trade books from 1860, Daedalus and The Museum of Classical Antiquities. These sealed wrapping jackets were different than the earlier ones that had no flaps. ... to be continued

End of the sealed wrapping style

The era of the sealed wrapping seems to have ended in the 1860s, more or less as the vogue for annuals ended. Whether or not the sealed wrapping was the first style of jacket to be used by publishers, it did not survive the proliferation of the more practical flap style. Publishers might have been issuing jackets of the flap-style by the 1820s or thirties, or even earlier for that matter. The flap style was certainly well known to publishers and the book trade generally from the many homemade jackets that were in use long before the nineteenth century.

Perhaps other examples of pre-1850, publisher-issued jackets survive and will come to light some day to provide a better understanding of their development. It is entirely possible, for example, that some of the annuals issued in paper boards and sheaths were also issued with sealed wrapping jackets which provided initial protection for both the bindings and the sheaths, or that annuals without sheaths had flap-style jackets in some cases (they did by the 1860s and probably much earlier), or that some trade books were issued with jackets of either type. The study of dust jackets before 1850 has many gaps and is a bit like an archaeological dig: the emergence of previously unknown evidence has the potential to drastically alter our knowledge and change the evolutionary time line.

We will probably never know which style of jacket was used first by publishers, but for now the sealed wrapping has precedence.

Part III: Flap-style dust jackets

The familiar dust jacket with flaps which is still used today is the second of two major types of jackets to be issued by publishers in the nineteenth century. The earliest reported example dates from 1839 on a German book, Funfzig Rathsel und Bilder fur Kinder von 8-12 Jahre, by Friedrich Hoffmann, published by Baedeker. The jacket was printed on porous pink paper with printing on both panels and the spine, including a decorative device and ads for other books.

The only other example recorded before 1850 is on a proof copy of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (London, 1846). This jacket is made of tissue paper with a cardboard slipcase. The book has a highly ornate binding. Both the jacket and the case are unprinted, and while they appear publisher issued, their origin cannot be proven. Even if they did originate from the publisher, they might have been issued only for the proof copy and not for trade editions. It would seem logical, however, that flap-style jackets were in at least moderate use in the 1830s and forties, both on trade books and annuals.

The 1850s

The earliest verified examples of publisher-issued jackets of the flap-style date from the 1850s. But only four different titles are known in such jackets from this decade. It is not nearly enough to prove that flap-style jackets were in regular use at this time.

[PLATE 16. Atlas Antiquus. Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1850. This is the earliest verifed jacket of the flap style. Folio with hand-colored maps. Trinity College, Oxford University]

The first of the verified flap-style jackets only recently came to light. It was discovered in the summer of 2009 in the archives of Trinity College, Oxford, by Dr. Paul Nash. The jacket is on Atlas Antiquus, published in Gotha, Germany, in 1850, although as Dr. Nash notes, the evidence for this binding shows that it (and the jacket) could have been issued any time between 1850 and 1854. (The common practice of issuing books in sheets and having them bound in subsequent years as needed must always be kept in mind when dating early dust jackets.)

A four-volume set of The Comprehensive History of England (London: Blackie & Sons, 1857) by Charles MacFarlane and Thomas Thomson, has been reported in jackets. The printing on the jackets includes the price. Like the 1839 German book, the owner and location of this set is not known and the set has never been seen, although in this case there can be no doubt about the date of issue, since the person who made the report (to Thomas Tanselle in 1968) was the indefatigable John Carter.

Carter also reported that year a three-volume set in jackets of A Comprehensive History of India, by Henry Beveridge, again published by Blackie & Sons. This work was issued in parts from 1858 to 1862, and it seems likely that the set in cloth and jackets was not issued until all the parts had appeared in 1862, although the first jacketed volume might have appeared before 1860. Efforts to locate either of the Blackie sets have been unsuccessful.

Earliest illustrated jacket

Another of the 1850s jackets is the earliest known illustrated jacket. It is on a copy of Wordsworth’s Pastoral Poems, published in London by Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, in 1859. The jacket on this book is remarkably modern. The uncredited illustration on the front panel does not appear inside the book, so it was made especially for the jacket. The book was part of Sampson Low’s Cundell Series of “Choice Editions of Choice Books,” twelve titles of which are listed on the back of the jacket, including the Wordsworth. Fifteen illustrators for the series are also listed, and there is a critical puff from The Athenaeum. The price of the book (five shillings) is printed at the bottom of the front panel, the whole of which is printed in a title page format, which was a very common method of printing dust jackets from the 1833 Keepsake through the 1870s, and in some cases to the end of the century. Like many early jackets, the Wordsworth is printed on colored glazed paper, and it is impossible to look at this specimen and not suppose that Sampson Low had been issuing such jackets for years, and that its competitors had been doing the same thing.

[PLATE 17. Pastoral Poems of William Wordsworth. London: Sampson, Low, Son & Marston, 1859. 12mo. This is the earliest known illustrated jacket. This jacket also has a list of other books in the same series, a list of illustrators, and a critical puff from The Athenaeum. One has to assume that all the titles listed on this jacket were also issued with jackets, and that Sampson Low had been using jackets for some years by the time this one appeared, and that many other publishers, at least in England, were issuing similar jackets in the 1850s. Author’s collection.]

The Wordsworth jacket only came to light in 2008. For decades the earliest known illustrated

[PLATE 18. Erzahlungen einer Grossmutter. Glogau: (no date but 1860, with actual issue in 1859). Owner signature dated 1859. Earliest known jacket over paper boards. Jacket printed similarly to title page with decorative border. Showing detail of owners signature. Author’s collection]

A German title, Erzahlungen einer Grossmutter, by Marie Nathusius, published in 1860 but issued in 1859, has recently come to light in jacket. It is the earliest recorded jacket on a book bound in paper boards. The book is not dated but it has a dated owner signature from 1859. The owner, named Barratt, also signed the jacket itself, evidently considering it an integral part of the book, one of very few people who felt that way in the 1850s. . ... to be continued


To be continued ...

[PLATE 21. Wooden box with hinged glass door for Mrs. Ellis’s four-volume Women of England (1839-43). She also wrote the Juvenile Scrap-Book. The publisher of both was Fisher, Son, & Co. of London. Two examples of this box are known, each with the slogan “The English Woman’s Family Library” on the pediment, suggesting that it was issued in quantity by the publisher, a firm that was also using sealed wrapping jackets in the 1840s. J. N. Bartfield, Bookseller, New York]

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A letter from Lewis Carroll to his publisher regarding the design of the dust jacket for The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

Christ Church, Oxford
February 6, 1876

Dear Mr. Macmillan

... Now for a suggestion which has just occurred to me. When you have got the lengthways title cut for the back [spine] of the book, I want you to print it (or the same words in ordinary type, which would do just as well) on the paper wrapper. The letters had better slope a good deal, so as to be easily read as the book stands upright. The advantage will be that it can stand in bookstalls without being taken out of paper, and so can be kept in cleaner and more saleable condition.

I should like the same thing done for Alice and the Looking-Glass for the future--and even those on hand, which are already wrapped in plain paper, might be transferred into printed covers ...

Very truly yours,

C. L. Dodgson

(From Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan, Cambridge University Press,1987, p. 121.)

Macmillan put the title on the jacket spine as Carroll suggested, although the letters were printed upright and not sloped. The jacket was also printed on its front panel in a title page format, and it had ads for three other Carroll books on the back panel, including Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

Carroll’s letter implies that dust jackets were commonly removed in bookstalls (and probably in bookstores too) as books were put out for sale, at least when the jackets had no identification on the spine, which was often the case. We can also deduce that publishers’ jackets were in widespread use by the 1870s since they had to be commonly issued in order to be commonly removed. Indeed, they must have been in common use for some years before the 1870s—common enough for long enough for Carroll to have formed his overall impression of how they were used. It seems to have been a familiar sight to him to see books in bookstalls that had been "taken out of paper" and as a consequence had become soiled with the soot and smoke of the Industrial Age.

Carroll was born in 1832, a time when dust jackets were already appearing on English annuals and probably on other books. The decoration of publishers’ cloth was coming into full flower when Carroll was a youth in the 1830s and forties, and there is a fair probability that dust jackets (at least printed ones if plain ones were often removed) were a common sight in bookstores when he was a boy and young man.

Throughout his career, Carroll took great interest in every detail of the production of his books. He worried obsessively about the quality of printing and binding and the overall condition and appearance of his books. He clearly believed that dust jackets should serve at least two purposes: to identify and protect. He wanted them to identify his books at a glance and to remain on all his books and keep them pristine until they were sold.

But for all his fastidiousness about bindings, paper, typography and artwork (and he filled the mails for years with such letters to Macmillan), Carroll seems to have never questioned the cheap brown paper used for his Snark jacket or complained that it was not illustrated. This, of course, is because he knew jackets were discarded after purchase. Cheap paper and plain type were fine for jackets so long as they were easily readable and served their temporary protective purpose. Had it been the custom in the 1870s to save jackets and keep them on books long after purchase, Carroll no doubt would have innundated his publisher with letters about their appearance too.

Carroll was probably an advocate of a third role for his dust jackets: advertising. He pestered Macmillan to update the advertising notices that were bound into the back of his books, so that they would reflect how many copies had been sold and so forth; similar information appeared in the ads on his Snark jacket and probably on others of his jackets as well (although his only other title known to have survived in its nineteenth century jacket is Sylvie and Bruno Concluded [1893] which has no ads on the jacket and is printed only on the spine with the title, publisher and price—but not, oddly enough, the author's name).

As Carroll requested, Macmillan also removed the plain jackets and made printed ones for its in-stock copies of Alice and Looking-Glass. Carroll offered to pay for this work, and Macmillan made it clear to him that switching jackets on existing stock would upset the routine of their warehouse. Today there are at least eight or ten surviving copies of the 1876 Snark in jacket, but there are no known copies of Alice or Looking-Glass in either plain or printed jackets from the 1860s or ’70s. If a first edition of Alice in Wonderland ever does turn up in the publisher's jacket, it will cause a sensation and probably be worth at least $100,000 at auction, if not a quarter-million or more.

In The House of Macmillan (1944), p. 110, it states that Carroll’s suggestion for spine printing on the jacket “may claim a share in the ancestry of the elaborate wrapper now called a 'jacket,’” but the practice was well-established long before 1876, if not particularly common. Macmillan itself had already printed not only the title but the publisher, author, price and even the date on the spine of the jacket of its illustrated folio edition of Tom Brown's School Days in 1869. The title also appears on the jacket spine of Macmillan’s Speaking Likenesses (1874), by Christina Rossetti, and there are reported examples of title printing on jacket spines from other publishers from the 1830s to the 1850s.

The exchange between Carroll and Macmillan is the only known correspondence between a publisher and an author regarding dust jackets in the nineteenth century.

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[The First Violin, by Jessie Fothergill. New York: Brentano's, 1896. 8vo. Two volumes. Cloth jackets and slipcase.]

Cloth Dust Jackets

The vogue for cloth dust jackets began in the late 1880s, reached its high water mark in the 1890s, and ended in the early 1900s.

Cloth jackets were usually made from the same fabric as the binding, with the same texture and color, and most of them had an applied backing of paper or mesh which gave them a stiff, permanently folded form. They were typically very plain, often being printed only on the spine and sometimes on the front panel. Some were decorated, but the bindings they covered were usually far more ornate. Unlike paper jackets which were usually run off by a printer, cloth jackets were made at the bindery. Common colors for cloth jackets were blue, green, red, gold and brown.

The main period of use for cloth jackets was 1890 to 1905. Early examples often have a pebbled texture, later ones a ribbed or smooth texture, matching the bindings. They appeared most often on gift editions in two volumes, often with a slipcase. These volumes typically had glossy paper, plates with tissue guards, ribbon markers and highly ornate bindings. Cloth jackets were very common in the nineties on reprints of literary classics, usually the works of Hawthorne, Irving and Eliot, and on books of European and Eastern travel such as the two-volume photogravure edition of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1895). A smaller number of trade books also appeared in cloth jackets in their first editions, the best known of these being the American first edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James (Harpers, 1903), of which perhaps ten percent of its print run of 4,000 copies survive in jacket, a far higher survival rate than for paper jackets of the period.

Many publishing houses issued cloth jackets during the fifteen or twenty years of their peak popularity, and they survive in large numbers today. Unlike paper jackets, cloth jackets were not meant to be discarded but were issued to provide permanent protection for fine bindings. The use of the same binding material for the jackets made them seem like an integral part of the book which no doubt contributed to the likelihood that they would be saved. These jackets and their bindings also harmonized nicely with the heavy decor of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, and they were practically indestructible. In an age when the fragile paper jackets issued with most books were all but universally discarded or quickly reduced to tatters, the sturdy cloth jackets of the nineties and early 1900s were almost impervious to chipping or loss, although they often became soiled, frayed or torn after decades of use. Because they are so common today and appeared mostly on reprint editions, they are usually less valuable than paper jackets of the same period. They simply lack the preciousness of paper jackets, but as objects of bookmaking art they have a definite appeal, one that is augmented by the wonderfully ornate bindings they often cover.

The printing on most cloth jackets is in gold leaf. Few were printed in color, and none are known with advertisements or blurbs. Extensive advertising would not have shown as well on cloth as on paper, and publishers may have considered the permanent cloth jackets of gift editions to be an inappropriate place for advertising that would soon become dated, or for garish commercial blurbs (which were coming into common use at the turn of the century).

Cloth jackets were used less often after about 1905. As bindings became less decorative and jackets more decorative, the paper jacket was naturally more suited to this change. Cloth jackets and slipcases were also more expensive, and paper jackets with cardboard slipcases answered just as well. Cloth jackets simply weren't suited to the extensive printing and marketing which were becoming necessary on dust jackets. By the end of the Edwardian period, the heyday of the cloth dust jacket was over.

Footnote: The earliest recorded cloth jacket is on William Stirling Maxwell's Antwerp Delivered in MDLXXVII (Edinburgh: David Douglass, 1878). There are also numerous copies of George Eliot's Romola (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1860 and 1863) in cloth jackets and slipcases, but these books were actually bound, boxed and jacketed in the 1880s or nineties using earlier sheets.

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LOST DUST JACKETS - DO YOU KNOW WHERE THEY ARE?

The following jackets were recorded decades ago, but their whereabouts today are unknown. We'd like to find them.

Bryant, William Cullen. The Bryant Festival at "The Century." New York: Appleton, 1865.

Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. London: Chapman & Hall, 1870. Formerly in the collection of A. Edward Newton. Sold at auction in 1941.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Hanging of the Crane. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875.

Trollope, Anthony. How the "Mastiffs" went to Iceland. London: Virtue, 1878.

Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus. New York: Appleton: 1881.

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Homemade jacket combined with publisher's jacket

The Boy Wanderer; or, No Relations, from the French of Hector Malot. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1887. Decorated cloth, beveled boards. Large 8vo. Illustrated. 494 pp. plus ads.

The jacket is homemade of heavy brown paper with three flaps at each end. Glued to the front panel and spine of the jacket are two pieces of printed paper that have the same design and title lettering as the binding. They evidently were cut from the original publisher-issued jacket (repeating the binding design on the jacket was common at the time). The book owner presumably fashioned the new jacket when the original wore out, or perhaps wished to have a more substantial jacket than the one supplied with the book. The three flaps were glued together at each end to make sure the jacket stayed on the book.
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[Mitford, Mary. Our Village. London: Macmillan & Co., 1893. Crown 8vo. AEG. 256 pp. Jacket with different decor than binding. Author’s collection]

Nineteenth Century Dust Jackets: An Illustrated History

PREFACE

History does not record when the first dust jacket was issued by a publisher or when their use became widespread. They appeared on bound books by the late 1820s, but how much earlier than that is unknown. They were in widespread use at some point in the second half of the nineteenth century, perhaps even in the first half, but exactly when is a matter of debate. There are very few references to dust jackets in publishers’ archives in the nineteenth century, and the physical evidence of surviving jackets decreases markedly the further back one goes.

From the record of known survivors in the Unites States, Great Britain and Europe, it is clear that dust jackets were widely issued on new books by the 1870s and probably by the 1860s or fifties. They may have been in common use before 1850, at least on certain types of books, but there are not enough surviving examples before mid century to prove it. What is certain is that these fragile, rarely saved covers had a much earlier and wider usage than is generally thought. They were also more colorful and carried more artwork and advertising in many cases than the historical perception of them as nothing but coarse plain wrappers would indicate. Publishers’ dust jackets appeared in two distinct forms in the nineteenth century, each with its own variants, and they played an important role not only in book protection but in book selling.

Before the 1820s, there was little occasion for publishers to issue dust jackets on bound books. For centuries, books were sold as unbound sheets to buyers who ordered and paid for their own bindings. Other books were sold in temporary bindings of paper or cloth which were replaced with leather or vellum after purchase. Temporary bindings did not need the protection of dust jackets, and few book owners wished to cover their permanent bindings. Bookbinding was an art form and the bindings were meant to be seen.

And yet dust jackets and other types of detachable covers were not unknown before the nineteenth century. Homemade jackets were fashioned out of paper, cloth and leather in the eighteenth century and probably much earlier. Chemises of velvet and leather survive from the fifteenth century. Book boxes of all sizes and descriptions—jeweled, lockable, even worn from a chain—were made for bound and unbound texts from biblical times to the Middle Ages. Publishers themselves issued pasteboard sheaths for small annuals and pocket diaries before 1800. But in the era of the modern printed book, from the introduction of movable type in the fifteenth century to the advent of case binding in the nineteenth century, most books were bound, sold, displayed and read without detachable covers of any kind.

Even after dust jackets became standard issue on new books, few people saved them. Many were removed by clerks as books were put out for sale, and most of the rest were discarded by buyers after purchase. The rise of publishers’ dust jackets in the nineteenth century was closely tied to a golden age of decorative bookbinding which lasted from the 1830s to the early 1900s. Throughout this period, most bindings were considerably more attractive than their jackets, and, as in the age of leather books, it was the bindings that people wanted to see on their shelves. In most cases, the role of the dust jacket was not regarded by publishers, booksellers or book owners as extending beyond the point of sale.

It was not until dust jackets became generally more attractive than bindings—a sea change that occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century—that people began to save jackets and keep them on their books. By that time, more than ninety-nine percent of all dust jackets ever issued had been lost.