This site is designed to show dust jackets from books relating to The Great War published between 1914 & 1939.
During this period most of the major works relating to the war were produced, often appearing in well designed & striking jackets. Unfortunately due to the poor materials used, the scant regard paid to the jacket as an integral part of the book, and the passage of time, these jackets have often become very scarce indeed. As I have acquired a large collection of these over the last 30 years or so I thought it might be of interest to others if I made them more widely accessible.
These will primarily be personal memoirs, fiction & poetry with a few general histories if the jackets look interesting enough. They are all British, Australian, Canadian or American 1st editions unless stated otherwise. While the emphasis is on books produced by serving soldiers there are many from non-combatants produced for the home market.
Of the over 900 books shown here, around 2/3 are from my own collection, and are for information only. I DO NOT produce facsimile jackets. I would welcome additional pictures of jackets I do not have for inclusion on this site. Please send them as jpgs - preferably no more than 50 KB in size – to my e-mail address below. I hope this will become an important resource for study of this neglected area.
Where else to look?
There seem to be very few sites on the net where dust jackets are displayed. I’ve listed a few in the links section alongside. Only a couple of books on the subject spring to mind : Jackets Required by Steven Heller & Seymour Chwast. Published by Chronicle Books, San Francisco 1995 & Front Cover by Alan Powers. Published by Mitchell Beazley 2001. There are several dealer catalogues from the past, which were essential to this passion of mine - those of Charlotte Robinson with their splendid covers taken from A Subaltern on the Somme & Schlump, Peter Scott’s catalogues for Bertram Rota, particularly 1988’s Catalogue 245 & William Reese Catalogue 150 of the Barry Maurer collection.
Of the current dealers Turner Donovan is probably the best, although their catalogue is unfortunately no longer illustrated, thankfully those of John Marrin still are. Between the Covers while not specialising in War books still houses a splendid display of jacketed books.
My apologies to the few dealers whose pictures I’ve used without acknowledgement - I will correct those at a later date.
Also my apologies at the rather inadequate nature of the indexing on the site. This is purely an amateur construction which will I hope improve with more familiarity with the software.
Useful Bibliographies
Cyril Falls - War Books. Peter Davies 1930. Highly opinionated but still invaluable.
A.G.S. Enser - A subject bibliography of the First World War. Deutsch 1979
Hager & Taylor - The Novels of World War One. Garland 1981. Over 1200 works listed.
J. P. Noffsinger - World War 1 Aviation. A Bibliography. Scarecrow Press 1997
Myron Smith - War Story Guide. An annotated bibliography. Scarecrow Press 1980
Catherine Reilly - English Poetry of the First World War. George Prior 1978
Edward G. Lengel - World War 1 Memories : An annotated bibliography of personal accounts published in English since 1919. Scarecrow Press 2004
