By its cover: E. McKnight Kauffer

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Colourful, carefully designed and highly produced; dust jackets are now ubiquitous in book publishing and are an important tool for publishers in making books look appealing to readers and communicating at a glance what they might find inside. However, it hasn’t always been so easy to judge a book by its cover. The use of decorated dust-jackets only became common in the inter-war period, when artists began looking for a more commercial market for their work. Previously, a dust jacket was most usually a disposable, plain paper wrapper, intended only to protect bindings during transportation and display. In the 1920s and ‘30s, publishers began to take advantage of dust jackets as tools to make their publications more attractive and as a space to include author biographies and adverts.

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Clik here to view. A selection of distinctive dustjackets from Victor Gollancz.

A selection of distinctive dust jackets from Victor Gollancz.

As many book collectors know, the presence of a dust jacket in good condition can increase the value of a book almost exponentially. Certain jackets, however, are collectable in their own right, and those designed by artist M. McKnight Kauffer between the 1920s and 1950s fall into this category. American by birth, Kauffer settled in Britain in 1914 and was known for producing iconic posters for the London Underground and Shell. His work was Modernist in flavour, and included Vorticist, Cubist and Futurist influences. His designs were popular with publishers who preferred abstract and symbolic, rather than figurative, designs for their covers. Kauffer’s talent for expression lay, said Aldous Huxley in his introduction to Kauffer’s Posters, in his methods of ‘simplification, distortion and transportation’. Kauffer’s style appealed particularly to publisher Victor Gollancz, who commissioned numerous jacket designs from him in a significant departure from their ‘house style’. Researching the most eye-catching colours and designs by observing adverts in railway stations, Gollancz hit upon their signature design of bright yellow jackets with magenta and black text, and this style was continued for many years. Although more decorative, Kauffer’s semi-abstract designs chimed with Gollancz’s bold aesthetic and could be economically produced in two-colour print.

This collection includes almost forty books with jackets designed by Kauffer, designs for Gollancz, the Hogarth Press, as well as work for American publishers.

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