We've settled back into work and home life after our time off at the end of June, and while we were unloading our finds from our trip to Cincinnati, we noticed something was awry.
At one of our stops in Cincy, we found a really cool edition of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights that contained wood engravings by the famous engraver/illustrator Fritz Eichenberg. The thing that made it interesting was its dust jacket, which had the title, author's name, illustrator's name and publisher all printed directly onto the clear plastic dust jacket (you can feel each raised letter), so that if you removed the dust jacket, you remove all of that info from your book's cover.
It is definitely unique. Sadly, it also appears to be very fragile. Here's a pic of what it looked like when we bought it (left) and what it looks like now (right), after having it with other books in a shopping bag for the trip home.
The "G" in "Wuthering" is now almost completely gone, the "N" isn't far behind, and other letters on that right-hand side are a little less full than they used to be.
Needless to say, this was alarming, especially since a big reason we added this book was because of the dust jacket. So we had to go to work to save it, or at least try to save it.
Our first stop was Random Row here in Charlottesville. In addition to being the place where we acquired the Eichenberg-illustrated Jane Eyre, we had learned a few weeks earlier in passing conversation with Ryan, Random Row's owner, that he personally covers many of his store's acquisitions with a clear plastic dust jacket. So we thought Ryan would be the perfect man for this job.
And we were right. Ryan said he hadn't seen a dust jacket like this one before, and he would certainly help us out. At first, it was determined that the plastic on our Wuthering Heights was too brittle and fragile to be flattened out and covered in the normal way Ryan would cover a book. In fact, we noticed that the dust jacket is already missing pieces, notably on the spine, from being chipped away as a result of nothing more than being opened and closed.
So we regrouped, and after being unable to find a suitable alternative to Ryan's plastic cover, we decided to make it work for us in a different way.
Rather than use a full dust jacket, we
essentially cut a piece to the size of the cover, and just used it as an overlay for the front only, taping to on a couple of edges and to the inside of the cover.
It's not necessarily pretty, but it's a solution that will hopefully do the trick, for now anyway. If not, we're open to any further suggestions on the best way to preserve this unique edition.
