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Books in Paper Covers

When the soliloquizer in the Spanish Cloister wished to consign Brother Laurence, his soul's abhorrence, to sudden and certain damnation, he determined to place within his enemy's reach his "scrofulous French novel," to look at which is the ruin of the soul. Although the poet does not so declare it in as many words, I have always believed that this scrofulous French novel was loosely clad in a cover of yellow paper, flimsy beyond question, and as easily destroyable as the soul of Brother Laurence.

Whether it be due to the French fiction which the British bard declared to be afflicted with the king's evil, or whether it be due to our American stories, sentimental and adventurous, of the kind familiar since the war as " dime novels," or whether it be due to some more recondite cause, there is no denying the fact that "yellow-covered literature" is not in good odour with book-lovers. Even the collector who nowadays despises nothing, be it never so humble, treats with contempt volumes stitched into paper covers mere brochures, as the French call them. So far as I know, not any book-lover is now gathering the books of all sorts which go forth to swift oblivion guarded against hard usage only by a wrapper of paper. There are collectors of book-plates, of postage stamps, of pictorial posters, but I have never heard of a collector of paper-covers. And yet, as the paper cover must needs be the work of a typographer or of a color printer, of a lithographer or of a designer in black and white, there seems to be no reason why it should be scorned when all else is cherished. The reasons for this neglect are not easy to declare when we consider the many wrappers prepared for magazines, for catalogues, for novels, and for children's books, by artists like Messrs. Elihu Vedder and Stanford White, Will H. Low and Joseph Pennell, Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, Luc Olivier Merson, Carloz Schwabe and Jules Cheret.

In one of the pleasantest essays of "As we were saying," Mr. Warner discusses the "Clothes of Fiction," and remarks on the summer and the winter apparel of romance. "As certainly as the birds appear comes the crop of summer novels, fluttering down upon the stalls, in procession through the railway trains, littering the drawing-room tables, in light paper covers, ornamented attractively in colors and fanciful designs, as welcome and grateful as the girls in muslin. In winter we prefer the boards and the rich, heavy binding, however light the tale may be; but in the summer, though the fiction be as grave and tragic as wandering love and bankruptcy, we would have it come to us lightly clad out of stays, as it were." The publishers understand this desire of the public, and they send forth their summer novels in loosely fitting garments fancy flannel shirts, so to speak, and striped blazers.