Typhoon: And Other Stories.

London: William Heinemann,, 1903. The only surviving example of the dust jacket First British edition, first impression, an extraordinary survival, the only known copy of this title complete with its original dust jacket and the earliest known jacket on any British edition of Conrad, the earliest hitherto recorded being Under Western Eyes (1911). Neither Wise nor Cagle record a jacket and no jacketed copy can be traced in commerce or auction records. One of the leading authorities on evolution of the printed dust jacket is Thomas Tanselle. In Tanselle's account, the modern style of printed paper dust jackets with flaps was firmly established as the predominant style of book covering from at least the 1860s. Paper dust jackets with flaps were useful because they allowed a customer to open a book in a bookshop without putting fingers on the decorative cloth binding beneath it. Early examples only rarely survive, however, because they were customarily discarded at the point of purchase. Some early jackets were plain paper, but publishers quickly filled up the space on the jacket panels with advertising. A few publishers experimented with jackets with a front panel design echoing that of the binding, but most jackets had typographic designs until the last quarter of the 19th century. As the present example shows, the fully typographic style persisted into the early years of the 20th. Tanselle notes that "Holes were frequently placed in the spines of jackets for series books, allowing the same jacket to be used for all volumes, since the titles of the individual volumes showed through the holes" (p. 77, n. 101). This was a cost-saving device and shows that the design of the jacket had not yet been conceived purely as a marketing tool for the individual book it protected. Tanselle gives a census of extant jackets on books published pre-1901, including another book published by Heinemann in 1897, Edmond About, The King of the Mountains, trans. Richard Davey (Tanselle census no. 97.53), which has the same style jacket, with a hole cut in the spine to allow the title and author's name to show through. William Heinemann Ltd was founded in 1890. The company published several works in series, including translations into English under the branding of "Heinemann's International Library", edited by Edmund Gosse. They also published the British version of Scribners' Great Education Series under the title Heinemann's Great Education Series. No doubt their familiarity with publishing series books in that era influenced their choice of jacket design. The company's relationship with Conrad began in the late 1890s, when Heinemann and the American publisher Frank Doubleday financially supported Conrad during his initial attempt at writing what eventually became The Rescue, and Heinemann was the British publisher for Conrad's The N***** of the 'Narcissus' in 1897. No dust jacket for the latter title is known to survive. These generic jackets, which were designed to be used for any title in the series, could theoretically be transferred from any other book in that series. Close examination of the various minute traces on both book and jacket demonstrates that this jacket has always been with this copy of the book. It would be difficult, in any case, to find another surviving jacket from the series, given the notable rarity of all British dust jackets before the Great War. One of the other titles from this series, Israel Zangwill's The Grey Wig, appears in auction records as early as 1904, yet no copy of that title down the years is noted as retaining the jacket. Similarly, Somerset Maugham's Mrs Craddock has a lengthy auction record, but no copy recorded in jacket. In a Parke-Bernet sale of January 1960, a job lot of Maugham first editions consisted of 13 works, all with dust jackets except for the earliest, Mrs Craddock. Likewise, the superb Somerset Maugham collection of Loren & Frances Rothschild did not have a copy of that book in jacket. Octavo. Original slate grey cloth, device to front board gilt, spine lettered in gilt, top edge cut, others untrimmed. With original printed dust jacket, die-cut towards head of spine as issued to reveal spine lettering. Housed in a black quarter morocco solander box. With 32-page publisher's advertisements at end. Paper repair at head of jacket spine with small portion of paper supplied, light marking where old tape removed, still a remarkable survival, the book in fine condition. Cagle A8b(1); Wise A13. G. Thomas Tanselle, Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use, 2011.