Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use. By G. THOMAS TANSELLE.

Abstract

The Bible for descriptive bibliographers, Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description, first published in 1949 and frequently reprinted, devotes barely a page to dust jackets. Bowers calls them ‘essentially a detachable part of the binding’ and recognizes their ‘place of some interest in [the publishing] history of the book’, but limits their interest to ‘purely historical’. G. Thomas Tanselle, who since 1969 has been collecting information about dust jackets and amassed a considerable collection himself, goes a great deal further and argues their bibliographical importance, as well as their artistic and literary merit. In March 1970 Tanselle read a paper to the Bibliographical Society, entitled ‘Book-Jackets, Blurbs and Bibliographies' (published in The Library, v, 26 (1971), 91–134), in which he rightly regretted the general neglect shown for book jackets by booksellers, collectors, and bibliographers. This paper forms the first chapter of the book reviewed here and is followed by revised versions (with different titles) of two further essays on the same subject, ‘Dust-Jackets: The Fate And State of Removable Dust-Jackets' and ‘Book-Jackets of the 1890s', published in Studies in Bibliography, respectively in 2006 and 2010. All three chapters talk about the history of book jackets, the attention that they have received (or not) from bibliographers, dealers, collectors, and librarians, all of whom come in sometimes for praise, but more often for censure. The changes jackets have undergone from their first appearance towards the end of the eighteenth century, as sheaths on annuals and gift books, during their proliferation throughout the nineteenth century, down to their regular use in the last quarter of the nineteenth and in the twentieth century, are set out in detail. The way jackets have been used by publishers, as well as their usefulness for publishing historians, art historians, and literary scholars are expounded. The pebbles thrown into the pond in the first chapter return, but with ever-widening circles, in the following chapters. Much of the information is repeated, but the arguments are increasingly fleshed out as more details and more examples are added.