April 2009

A librarian at Oxford’s Bodleian Library has unearthed the earliest-known book dust jacket. Dating from 1830, the jacket wrapped a silk-covered gift book, Friendship’s Offering. Silk bindings were very vulnerable to wear and tear, so bookselllers would keep them in these wrappers to protect the binding underneath. When you bought the book you would take the wrapper off and put it on your shelves, which is presumably why so few of these covers have survived.

Unlike today’s dust jackets, wrappers of the early 19th century were used to enfold the book completely, like a parcel. Traces of sealing wax where the paper was secured can still be seen on the Bodleian’s discovery, along with pointed creases at the edges where the paper had been folded, showing the shape of the book it had enclosed.

The jacket had been separated from its book, and had never been catalogued individually. It remained hidden until the library was contacted by an American scholar of dust jackets looking for the earliest known example.

On NPR:

Author Craig Yoe explores the risque art of the man behind Superman in his new book, Secret Identity: The Fetish Art Of Superman’s Co-creator Joe Shuster.

As Yoe explains, artist Joe Shuster did not earn much money for his part in the creation of the man of steel. After suing D.C. Comics over the copyright for Superman, Shuster drew art for an obscure series of magazines called Nights Of Horror. In Secret Identity, Yoe collects Shuster’s racy drawings and details the scandal and murder trial related to Nights Of Horror.

Full piece here.

Related item at The Book Calendar: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America

Last week I posted a story about the closing of College Park Maryland’s Vertigo Books(“Shopping Online is Seductive, But…”), and later pointed out a column by the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher on the store’s demise.

At the end of Fisher’s column, he polled his readers asking “What’s your obligation as a customer to support local bookstores?” As of today, Bookselling This Week reports the results were as follows:

* Some–if they create an enriching place, I’ll pay somewhat higher prices to support them — 43%
* Serious–great local bookshops are foundations of community, well worth the price to keep alive — 31%
* None–they either win me over on price and service or they deserve to die — 12%
* Don’t know–locally-owned bookstores already vanished from where I live — 12%

Which category do you fit in? Do you still have a great indie bookstore near you? Tell us about it, with a link if you’d like.

Yahoo! GeoCities will close later this year. “We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.”
$3.6 billion down the drain.

Following up on the discussion in LISTen 68, reporting by Radio New Zealand International notes that military-backed censors are supervising newsrooms in Fiji.

A territorial delegate to the United States House of Representatives, Faleomavaega Eni Hunkin, is now advising US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the matter.

Marshall Breeding: In a bold move that could reshape the library automation landscape, OCLC has expanded WorldCat Local’s existing cataloging and discovery tools with new circulation, delivery, and acquisitions features. This new project, which OCLC calls “the first Web-scale, cooperative library management service,” will ultimately bring into WorldCat Local the full complement of functions traditionally performed by a locally installed integrated library system (ILS).

Twilight has turned to retail darkness for Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling vampire series at Deseret Book, a small chain owned by the the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The bulk of Deseret Book’s business comes from the sale of church-related titles; interestingly, author Meyer is a member of the Mormon church.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported the company will no longer stock the books on shelves in its chain stores, though it will special order the titles for store pick-up or mail delivery. “We’re never really given a reason for these things,” said Steve Hartvigsen, manager of the Deseret Book store in West Valley City, Utah. “We just get a return sheet and send books back.”

The Stonewall Library and Archives, a collection of gay-themed materials that was the subject of political controversy two years ago, celebrates its grand opening in Fort Lauderdale on Thursday.

”When I showed the materials to the city attorney, he said it was likely hard-core pornography,” Naugle said at a 2007 City Commission meeting, one of many comments he made that angered gay activists. “I feel troubled a city building would be housing materials with content we have arrested people for in the past.”

Hobbled by censorship at home and ignorance of China abroad, Chinese writers are failing to make a major impact globally, 90 years after a landmark literary revolution.

A year and a half of debate over filtering pornography out of San Jose public library computers came to a head late Tuesday when the City Council rejected spending money on the technology.

“The fear is not based on fact,” said Tina Morrill. “We can use this money to keep our library hours longer.”