 |
| Cover of Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, (1886) Macmillan |
The Public Domain Review (one of a number of lovely websites that make public domain materials easier to track down and enjoy) has published a beautiful overview of some of the best of these covers. I strongly urge what few readers I have to check it out. Some of the examples are of breathtaking beauty, and even the plain ones are impressive.
(The example to the right is by no means the best of what's on display here. Even popular science books, such as The Story of the Sun or Spectrum Analysis, got beautiful coloured covers.)
Lorna and I have a few books in our library with this sort of cover, but as I said we don't really collect books as things in themselves. Willing to bet some of our friends, though, have between them hundreds of these in their collections. Book people are sometimes weird, but invariably interesting to know.
*And expensive. By the time dust jackets could carry that graphic responsibility thanks to inexpensive mechanical reproduction, the art of embossing and colouring board bindings had become prohibitively expensive and most publishers were happy to stop doing it.
2 comments:
Creating books as objects elevate them; takes something ephemeral and makes it tangible. Making a book brilliant to behold illuminates the words and give a book a certain immortality. It's all part of the same impulse that makes me love carving stone.
As clever and wonderful as our words may be, it's not until they become physical objects that they have any permanence - a fate I think all good words deserve....
Not sure I agree, Dale. For me, in the end, content is king. I have gladly kept worn-out, ratty, mass-market paperbacks of books I loved reading. As objects these were only barely tangible; it was (and is) the words that mattered. And I have read and enjoyed plenty of books that existed only as 1s and 0s on my e-reader.
Post a Comment