"Could you make it rather more of a He and She picture": Queer Texts and Dust Jackets in Mid-Twentieth Century British Fiction
"Could you make it rather more of a He and She picture": Queer Texts and Dust Jackets in Mid-Twentieth Century British Fiction
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“你能把它做得更像是他和她的照片吗”：二十世纪中叶英国小说中的酷儿文本和防尘套
DOI：
10.1086/722614
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发表时间：
2022
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Adams C
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文献类型：
--
作者：
Adams C
自从G.托马斯·坦塞尔在1971年发表了他的论文《书皮、公告和书目》，防尘套作为“出版史的原材料”越来越受到学术界的关注。[1]通过追溯从19世纪30年代到（当时）今天的早期例子，坦塞尔得出结论，防尘套是一种“重要的原始材料”，为出版历史学家提供了从价格和印刷数字到作者传记信息的信息。[2]在他的后续文章《防尘套、经销商和文献》中，坦塞尔发展了他对防尘套的理解，认为它们不仅“展示了有趣或重要的设计师和插图画家的作品”，而且对于出版历史学家来说，它们展示了“出版商的品味和时代风格”。[3]安东尼·罗塔（Anthony Rota）总结了防尘套作为文化标记的学术用途，他写道，防尘套是“理解过去两个世纪书籍装订和营销的核心，是它们所包裹的单个书籍的历史，也许最有趣的是，它反映了市场上不断变化的品味。”虽然防尘套对学术的价值是肯定的，但对出版商来说，防尘套还有一个更重要的功能：卖书。对于世纪中期的英国图书市场来说，防尘套是必不可少的销售工具。这一时期见证了插图防尘套的蓬勃发展：马丁·索尔兹伯里（Martin Salisbury）称之为“手工绘制的插图”，从20世纪20年代到20世纪60年代后期摄影技术的出现主导了英国的书籍设计。1949年，马克斯·比尔博姆（Max Beerbohm）发现走进一家书店是一种压倒性的感官体验，在这种体验中，书籍“激烈地相互竞争以吸引人们的注意力，在设计和色彩上激烈地努力超越其他书籍。[6]正是这种作为文本和市场交汇点的功能，使防尘套成为出版商的主要关注点。据出版商安东尼·布朗德（Anthony Blond）称，防尘套的创作--通常与排版同时进行--涉及大量竞争性的生产和编辑关系：“[防尘套]可能是一个单独的部门的责任，在从编辑那里拧出导语后，必须找到一个合适的设计师，他将提交可能不会取悦销售部门的草图。对出版商来说，取悦销售部门意味着委托一个夹克，包括引人注目的设计，强烈的解释性存在，最重要的是标题和作者姓名的清晰呈现。一件好的夹克不一定能促进销售，但一件坏的夹克肯定会损害销售，这是一个老生常谈的问题。防尘套和销售之间的联系在今天仍然适用：在《书籍的服装》中，Jhumpa Lahiri反映说，第一次看到她的小说穿着防尘套“将文本转化为一个物体，一个可以出版、发行，最终销售的具体东西。8
Since G. Thomas Tanselle published his 1971 essay “Book-Jackets, Blurbs, and Bibliographers,” dust jackets have gained increasing scholarly attention as the “raw material of publishing history.” 1 Tracing early examples from the 1830s through the (then) present day, Tanselle concludes that dust jackets are an “important class of primary material” and provide publishing historians with information ranging from price and impression figures to biographical information about authors. 2 In his follow-up article,“Dust-Jackets, Dealers, and Documentation,” Tanselle develops his understanding of dust jackets, arguing that not only do they “display the work of interesting or significant designers and illustrators” but that, for publishing historians, they show “something of the publisher’s taste and […] the style of the times.” 3 Anthony Rota summarizes the scholarly usefulness of dust jackets as cultural markers when he writes that they are “central to an understanding of the binding and marketing of books over the last two centuries, to the history of the individual books they envelop, and perhaps most intriguingly, as a reflection of changing tastes in the marketplace.” 4While the dust jacket’s value to scholarship is assured, for publishers dust jackets have a more prosaic function: to sell books. For the British book market in the mid-twentieth century, dust jackets were an essential sales tool. The period witnessed a flourishing of illustrated dust jackets: what Martin Salisbury refers to as “hand-rendered pictorial illustrations” dominated British book design from the 1920s until the emergence of photographic techniques in the later 1960s. 5 In 1949 Max Beerbohm found walking into a bookshop an overwhelming sensory experience, in which books were “violently vying with one another for one’s attention, fiercely striving to outdo the rest in crudity of design and colour.” 6 It is this function as a meeting point between text and market that made dust jackets a chief concern of publishers. According to the publisher Anthony Blond, the creation of the dust jacket—often concurrent with the typesetting—involved the text in a host of competing production and editorial relationships:“[the dust jacket] will probably be the responsibility of a separate department which, having screwed the blurb out of the editor, has to find an appropriate designer who will submit sketches which might not please the sales department.” 7 For the publisher, pleasing the sales department meant commissioning a jacket that incorporated eye-catching design, strong interpretive presence, and—most importantly—the clear rendering of the title and the name of the author. It was a commonplace that, while a good jacket would not necessarily boost sales, a bad jacket could certainly harm them. The link between dust jackets and sales still holds true today: in The Clothing of Books, Jhumpa Lahiri reflects that seeing her novels for the first time in their dust jackets “transforms the text into an object, something concrete to publish, distribute, and, in the end, sell.” 8