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Modern Library dust jackets are often quite distinctive. In fact, many collectors were first drawn to the Modern Library because of the wide variety of great dust jacket designs that have appeared in the long history of the series. But in 1918 there appeared a design that defies logic. The dust jacket gave no indication of the title it covered, nor of its author, nor anything else except that the book was in the Modern Library series and was made of "Limp Croft Leather." In order to display the book with its title showing, you'd need to tear off the top of the dust jacket spine. Barry Neavill speculates that jackets for individual Modern Library titles may have run short on several occasions, and so the publisher (Boni-Liveright) decided to order some generic jackets that could be used in a pinch on any Moden Library book. The generic dust jacket seems to be extremely rare with only three examples reported so far—one each on copies of Evolution of Modern Thought, Wilde's Poems, and Best Russian Short Stories. |
