Allegedly Missing Dust Jackets |
| Henry Toledano's Modern Library Price Guide 1917-2000 (reviewed elsewhere on ModernLib) included a first attempt at identifying the myriad dust jacket variations in the ML series. He knew he wouldn't catch them all; as he says in the Guide on page 20, "Clearly I have not seen every ML dust jacket in existence, so there will be omissions." Since that time, the wild growth of the Internet and its bookselling venues - especially the amazing success of eBay - have shown how right he was. Hundreds of variations not listed in the Guide have appeared, many of which have been added to the ModernLib ML Dust Jacket Database.
The question then became this: if so many dust jackets exist that are not documented in the Guide, what titles that are actually in the Guide are missing from the ModernLib database? John Krygier, host of the Modern Library specialized e-mail list, suggested that making manifest the Guide/ModernLib DJ disconnects would help collectors identify what DJs in their own collections were missing from the database, and would thus facilitate their contributing their images to ModernLib. Being bored, your contributing editor took on the task of locating the allegedly missing dust jackets and constructing a table to make it easy for collectors to compare what's in the database with their own DJs. I say "allegedly" because I'm not sure that all of the listed DJs in the table are actually missing—I think that many of the DJ entries in the Guide may not exist. The vast majority of missing DJs are of the earliest styles, DJ 1-4. These are the styles that on the DJs all-text front panel have no logo, a small logo, or a large logo. In many cases where the Guide says a small-logo style is missing, the database has a large-logo style; and where the Guide says a large-logo style is missing, the database has small-logo style. This leads me to believe that the Guide has a number of double entries—one for a small-logo style and one for a large-logo style—when in fact one of the entires doesn't exist, and that in other cases it has small-logo and large-logo styles confused.
Alleged missing DJs are listed in the column of the approximate date of the DJ's earliest appearance. Thus if the entry is in the 1917 column, it likely first appeared between 1917 and 1925; in the second column first appearance was sometime between 1925 and 1928, and so on. The letters x, b, B, T, D, and P are the same as the ones used in the Guide, described on pages 18-20:
An entry with a questionmark means that I seriously doubt the existence of the DJ in question. If you think you may have a DJ in the list, click the linked title to check out what DJs already exist for that title in the database, just to be sure. If you have questions or if you find that you do indeed have a missing DJ, please let me know. Or you can just e-mail me an image of your DJ (JPEG format, full-sized, 150 DPI is ideal). |