Chapter 82 A Welcome Surprise

One thing I find myself doing before exhibiting at book fairs is buying a few books purely for their visual appeal. They don’t have to be by significant authors or contain important works of literature. They merely have to look good, to act as booth candy, so to speak. I do this so I can have some beautiful books face out on my shelves, in hope that passers by will see them and feel compelled to come and take a closer look.

Does this actually work? I don’t know. It worked at the Central Valley Antiquarian Book Fair in Sacramento in September. The upcoming San Francisco Antiquarian Book and Paper Show in February has a lot more exhibitors and a much larger exhibition hall. My gut tells me it will be crucial to attract visitors into my booth as they walk by. There are too many exhibitors to have enough time to stop at every single booth. What customers see as they walk by must make them (at least many of them) want to stop in and have a look. With that in mind, I bought the following little lovely on ebay recently:

I like the welcoming cover, and think it will look nice next to a couple of similarly gilt-embellished pioneer books I have, face out. It’s an 1881 printing of the famous song, “Home Sweet Home”. What? You say it’s not familiar to you? Well, then, how about the lyric, “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home”? Even if you grew up only watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, you’re likely to know that lyric (unless, of course, you are reading this from outside of the United States).

So, based on the photo above and a very brief description of condition, I bid on and won this book on ebay. When the book arrived, it had one detail not shown in the photo and not mentioned in the written description. Ordinarily, that would really be disappointing, but when I buy on ebay I know that not all descriptions are accurate. Ebay has such a range of sellers — from professionals to hobbyists to people emptying Grandma’s attic. You pay your money and you take your chances as to accuracy of description when you buy there. In this case, I was extremely pleased with the detail that was not mentioned in the auction description:

It’s the original dustjacket, from 1881. Now, somewhere along the way (why can’t I remember where — was it the Colorado Seminar?) I learned that dustjackets before the 20th century are uncommon. They were commonly produced but often thrown away as one throws away the wrapper on a piece of soap. I’ll need to make sure that’s the case. I had never seen a dustjacket from the 1800s before I came across this one, but my experience is too limited to say with certainty that this dustjacket is old and uncommon. I hope this is where those reference books start paying for themselves.

Let’s see. According to John Carter (ABC for Book Collectors), “The earliest recorded dust jacket dates from 1832 (many decades earlier than most people would guess). But its history till the end of the century is almost entirely unexplored , and surviving examples earlier than the mid-eighties are very uncommon indeed. This is natural enough, since dustjackets were — and functionally still are — ephemera in the most extreme sense: wrappings intended to be thrown away before the objects they were designed to accompany were put to use.”

Geoffrey Glaister (Encyclopedia of the Book) says, “Copies of Heath’s Keepsake, 1833, are held to be the first book for which a paper protecting jacket was provided by the publisher. . . However, it was not until the 1880s that the provision of jackets became at all common.”

A bit more research is probably in order — I’ll probably check the Bibliography of American Literature (BAL), which I don’t yet own but can look at at a library in the town next to mine. Still, it looks as though I have an early example of a dustjacket, covering a beatiful book. Cool! (Even if it’s not cool, I’ll still learn a lot about dustjackets in the process and retain that information for future use!)

My dilemma now is whether to display the book with the pretty gilt binding or with the dustjacket — not as pretty, but definitely the major selling point of this book. I love it when I have these type of dilemmas. They are simply too few and far between!

See you in the stacks!