W. B. Conkey Dust Jacket

Sport's themes on the covers of juvenile series books in the early 1900's are a common finding. Discoveries of baseball, football and track are probably the most common. Tennis, on the other hand, is quite scarce as a cover subject.

In a previous blog post I pictured a number of covers with different sports including the High School Girl Series which has a tennis cover and dust jacket.

Here is another tennis dust jacket.


This book is from the 50 volume Varsity Series that was published by W.B. Conkey in the early 1900's. The titles are all reprints. Conkey published numerous publisher's series (of which this is one) as well as many children's board books. Its list also contained most all the usual subjects.

The Varsity Series included books by Henty, Optic, Verne in addition to other well known authors of the time.

Finding Conkey books with dust jackets is somewhat difficult. In fact, most advertisements note-"no jacket, as issued". That statement is generally wrong about all the publishers of the era, including Conkey. Of course, notwithstanding that an example of a Varsity Series jacket is shown here, the Conkey catalogue does note that the series was published with "printed wrappers"