This is the last exhibition curated by Monash University’s rare books librarian, Richard Overell; he is retiring.
Richard has used the Library’s exhibition space to display multiple aspects of this important book and ephemera collection. He is talking about book jackets on Tuesday 22 July. See the events’ calendar for details.
Alison Forbes is perhaps the best Australian jacket designer. Here is an example of her work used on the first edition of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. It has a period feel, with appropriately psychedelic lettering and a dream-like, surreal, fractured image.
This exhibition looks at dust jackets – sadly treated by large libraries as not just ephemeral but rubbish. Dust jackets are generally tossed immediately, excepting for rare and art books. This is despite the dust jacket being an important part of the product that author, illustrator, publisher consider at length and often with beautiful or at least eye catching results.
The earliest known example of a dust wrapper is on a copy of Friendship’s Offering 1830 (1829).The earliest in our collection is from 1860, a survival from the period when the wrapper extended around the text block to keep the dust from the gilt edges. It has a simple design, based on that used on the cloth cover.
Such wrappers were not meant to be retained once the book was bought. The paper is very thin and easily damaged.
Here is the link to the exhibition.
This example shows a patterned cloth dust jacket, which, we are told, the author, “Mabel” particularly requested. In the Addendum, she describes the “home-made” cloth cover which she took to her publisher, so it could be duplicated two or three thousand times.
“I feared I should have to put up with those uninteresting cloth things with gilt letters, just like other people’s books, but the dark-eyed young man helped me out of my difficulty by saying that there were lots of girls in his factory who had to earn their bread-and-butter, and that they could make the covers quite as well as I could if I would leave the one I had made as a pattern for them to copy.”
It has the book’s details on the label pasted on the front, and the cover is stitched on. The spine of the book has the same patterned cloth with a plain cardboard cover.
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