By Jonathan Wantrup
The importance and value now placed on dustwrappers by Australian collectors has been a long time coming. As recently as the early 1990s quite experienced booksellers and collectors were still discarding dustwrappers, apparently because they dishevelled their shelves or because they did not fit well with the older books that surrounded them. In about 1993 Paul Feain, as closely acquainted with the general run of collectors as anyone, remarked to me that ‘only booksellers care about dustwrappers’. For once booksellers were ahead of the game. Thirty years on, the market has demonstrated just how much collectors now appreciate – not just in dollar terms – dustwrappers on Australian books published in the decades before the Second World War, a degree of appreciation that increases exponentially as one moves back to the 1890s.
In a recent article, ‘An Early Australian Dust-Jacket’, Professor Wallace Kirsop generously mentioned the exhibition on Australian dustwrappers that I assembled for the 1998 ANZAAB Bookfair and for which I was able to locate only two nineteenth-century Australian dustwrappers.1 More to the point, Professor Kirsop mentioned Professor Paul Eggert’s difficulty in understanding the ‘wrapper’ for Henry Lawson’s While the billy boils:
Orders for special-purpose ‘wrappers’ and ‘postcards’ also appear in the Ledger as a charge against While the Billy Boils. The wrappers seem to have served not as dust jackets (none appears to have survived) but for postal purposes, and probably had a blurb printed on them or on the postcards.2
However, at least one complete example of the Lawson dustwrapper does exist. Or did exist 40 years ago. It was in my collection of colonial fiction sold to Peter Arnold in the early 1980s.3 I do not have a photograph of the entire dustwrapper but I do have a moderately helpful description from my own cataloguing:
rose-brown dustwrapper with an untitled Walter Syer vignette on the front panel, title, author, and publisher on the spine, publisher’s advertisements on the back panel, flaps blank. The front panel vignette [by Walter Syer] is the same as that found on the front pastedown endpaper of the special issue of this book, limited to 12 copies.
This style of dustwrapper was adopted by Angus & Robertson for the three books they published, for the first time on their own behalf, in 1895-6: AB Paterson’s The man from Snowy River and other verses (cream paper), Henry Lawson’s While the billy boils (rose-brown paper), and Edward Dyson’s Rhymes from the mines and other lines (grey paper). I have handled, in one form or another, all of these dustwrappers. Unlike Lawson’s and Dyson’s books, I have only handled imperfect dustwrappers for Paterson. I have not seen or had reported a dustwrapper for the other book of the period, Henry Lawson’s In the days when the world was wide and other verses, but logic and publisher’s practice demand that it too was supplied with a dustwrapper.
This characteristic style of dustwrapper on light brown or rose-brown paper (rose-brown is readily affected by light and most will show at least some sign of fading to brown or tan) continued in use by Angus & Robertson at least until 1905 and I have seen similar dustwrappers for Henry Lawson’s On the track over the sliprails (1900) and When I was king and other verses (1905), as well as AB Paterson’s Rio Grande’s last race and other verses (1902).
It should be noted that the dustwrapper for On the track over the sliprails has a vignette on the front and on the back panels which are the same as the vignettes on the front and back pastedown endpapers of the special issue of this book limited to 50 copies. These two vignettes were themselves both repeated from the wrappers on the first impression of the book as parts 1 and 2 of Angus & Robertson’s new ‘Commonwealth Series’.
It has been said that George Robertson played at book publishing and one suspects he had as much fun as possible in these early years creating special and very limited issues of the books he published. The most extreme examples I know of were uncut copies of May Gibbs’ Little Obelia and Little Ragged Blossom, limited to six inscribed copies.
The limited ‘editions’ of Paterson’s The man from Snowy River and other verses, Lawson’s In the days when the world was wide and other verses and his Verses popular and humorous were printed on large paper and bound in good quality dark blue-green buckram. Lawson’s prose works, While the billy boils and On the track over the sliprails, were not printed on such large paper but were similarly bound in dark blue-green buckram and printed on slightly larger paper.
Were these special issues provided with printed dustwrappers? If they were, none appear to have survived even in fragmentary form. However, a copy of the octavo limited issue of On the track over the sliprails, presented by Lawson to Jim Tyrrell retains a clear glassine dustwrapper, worn and aged; similarly, a copy of the large paper Verses popular and humorous. It seems probable that all the limited editions came with a protective glassine dustwrapper.
These early examples of Angus & Robertson dustwrappers evidence a fairly consistent austerity between 1895 and 1905 (to be very approximate) but in the 1910s their books show a more considered and artistic approach to dustwrapper design – witness the dustwrappers on Norman Lindsay’s Magic pudding and on the books of CJ Dennis and May Gibbs, among others.
As Wallace Kirsop shows, dustwrappers were present on even comparatively uncommercial books like The union book and it is quite surprising that so few have survived from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, even allowing for the contempt in which later generations of collectors, booksellers, and librarians have held them.4 One dustwrapper, possibly unique, in my own collection is for one of the great Australian books of the era, Joseph Furphy’s Such is life.
Its interest extends beyond the fact that it actually survived: it foreshadows the future of dustwrapper design. The later nineteenth-century dustwrappers prepared for books with pictorial or decorated cloth covers were often printed with – if anything – a line-drawn replica of the cloth design or image. This was even the case for serious books such as Ernest Giles’ Australia twice traversed that was included in the 1998 ANZAAB exhibition. The Bulletin’sdustwrapper for Such is life is printed in colour, repeating the book’s familiar cover design with its coloured decoration and lettering.
A little more than a decade in the future and all the design and colour would be found on dustwrappers and the books beneath might – if anything – in their turn repeat the dustwrapper decoration in plain line-drawn form.
Notes
1. Wallace Kirsop, ‘An Early Australian Dust-Jacket’, Script & Print 42, no. 3 (2018), pp 170-7. Like most booksellers and collectors, I employ the word ‘dustwrapper’, a word that has been used by booksellers, collectors, and publishers for over a century without any sign of confusion. ‘Book jacket’ and ‘book-jacket’ have currency among academic bibliographers, who extend it to refer to all removable book coverings, whether all-over wrappings, printed envelope wrappings, slip cases and other forms of cartonnage, or – the object under discussion – dustwrappers. John Carter, over half a century ago, was ultimately responsible for the shallow argument that (ignorant) people might confuse ‘dust wrapper’, ‘dust-wrapper’, or ‘dustwrapper’ with ‘wrappers’, a claim still regurgitated endlessly and uncritically by others.
2. Paul Eggert, Biography of a book (Sydney, 2013), p 163; see also p 359, note 3, for a related misinterpretation of the Syer illustration that was prepared for the dustwrapper and also used in the limited issue.
3. Some years later, when I tried to track down this copy, Peter Arnold informed me that it had been bought by an anonymous customer whom he had not seen before or since.
4. See Gill Partington, ‘Dust Jackets’ in Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (eds), Book parts (Oxford University Press, 2019), especially pp 17-21.
[Biblionews 417, March 2023, pp 3-7]