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"

19th Century Dust Jackets- Payne Holden and Company

19th century dust jackets are quite scarce. As you can imagine, the jackets were frequently removed from the book voluntarily or torn/destroyed involuntarily. Most of the jackets of course were published contemporaneously with the books by the publisher of the book.

There is a subcategory however in which the jackets were published by a different company. Payne, Holden and Company, based in Dayton was one of these latter companies. Advertisements in the various trade journals in the late 1870's advertise the Payne Holden book covers. The book covers were patented November 16, 1875 as per the advertisements. As noted below, the covers were for covering "school books". They could be applied in one second and were stronger than cloth.

This book" An Elementary Grammar of the English Language for the Use of Schools" written by Thos. W. Harvey was copyrighted in 1869. It was one of numerous well received school books published by Wilson, Hinkle & Co. from Cincinnati. This book was co-published with Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger (Philadelphia) and Clark & Maynard ( New York).

Exact dating is impossible but I can get pretty close. Clark & Maynard were in business between 1863 and 1889. Claxton, Remsen, & Heffelfinger published books between 1868 and 1880. Since these jackets were patented in 1875, this book and jacket are undoubtedly from the years between 1875 -1880. An inscription scribbled in the book of 1883 helps a bit.

This is a nice example of an 1870's dust jacket