When was the first book dust-jacket issued and who was the first bibliophile to decorate his book with a dust–jacket?
The first Boot (DUST-JACKET was issued with The Keepsake, 1833, an annual published by Longman, London in November 1832. It was pale buff, with a decorative border enclosing the title printed in red, and advertisements for other Longman publications on the back. The spine was plain. This unique book-jacket was discovered by the English bibliophile John Carter in 1934, and predated by 28 years the earliest book-jacket reported hitherto. It was lost in 1952 while being taken to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and no other example has ever been found.
The first PICTORIAL DUST-WRAPPER was issued with an edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress published by Longman in 1860. The illustration reproduced on the buff wrapper was a woodcut by Charles Bennett, also contained in the book itself.
The Keepsake jacket of 1832 and The Pilgrim’s Progress jacket of 1860, as well as the half dozen or so examples known to have been issued between these dates, were all designed to completely enclose the book. The earliest-known example of a book-jacket of the modern kind (i.e. with flaps folding in between cover and end-papers, leaving the edges of the pages free, and with the title printed on the spine) was issued with Noel Paton’s Poems by a Painter, published by Blackwood of Edinburgh in 1861.
The first PUBLISHERS KNOWN TO HAVE USED ‘BLURBS’ ON THEIR BOOK-JACKETS were ‘Harper’ and ‘Dodd Mead’, both of New York. Three examples survive from 1899—Harper’s Admiral George Dewey, by John Barrett, and their The Enchanted Type-writer, by J.K. Bangs, and Dodd Mead’s Janice Meredith by P.L. Ford.
The word ‘blurb’ was coined by American author Gelett Burgess in 1907. At the American Booksellers’ Association banquet that year he defined the verb ‘to blurb’ as ‘to make a sound like a publisher’ and added ‘A blurb is a cheque drawn on Fame, and it is seldom honored’.
