AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

The modern first edition dust jacket—so often discarded in its day—has become the part of a book that holds the most historical and commercial value. Despite this increase in their artifactual status, I have observed extensive cosmetic restorations to valuable dust jackets over the years that don’t suit their rarity and importance. This talk will demonstrate nearly invisible repairs to damaged modern first edition dust jackets using a lightweight kozo tissue precoated with Klucel G (hydroxypropylcellulose) adhesive and leaving losses to be filled visually by a toned or printed secondary jacket placed underneath the original. The advantage of this approach is that the dust jacket retains its authentic condition while appearing complete when viewed from a short distance on exhibit. A dust jacket in poor condition can easily be made to look better or its poor condition can be emphasized, depending on the needs of curatorial interpretation.

These subtle and easily reversible strategies for loss compensation were developed to satisfy a curatorial brief at the Houghton Library of Harvard University in early 2023 to return a once disassociated and broken dust jacket for E.E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922) to usable condition for display and then storage on its book thereafter. The goal was to make the jacket appear as though it did not have losses from a distance in the exhibition while avoiding invasive and time-consuming fills in order to leave the jacket as original as possible.

The core of this talk will be an illustrated and stepwise review of The Enormous Room dust cover treatment along with my rationale for avoiding any aqueous techniques with this type of material. Additional examples of this treatment approach will be shown where greater compensation for design and text was required of the secondary jacket. Information on sourcing, scaling, and color-correcting digital files to match the original jacket will be provided. Finally, It is hoped that the visibility of the post-print of this presentation in the Book and Paper Group Annual will show that there is a conservative yet aesthetically satisfying alternative to the in-painting and fills common in current dust jacket restoration.