Happy festive season, readers! I hope your winter has been as bright and colourful as the archive highlights I have for you here. I found two boxes full of these lovely (and mostly well preserved!) dust jackets from the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s after battling through a box of Edwardian insurance papers – a very welcome development at the time. All of the covers come from books written by Yorkshire authors, and are accompanied by copious newspaper clippings relating to Yorkshire literature. I bring but a tiny selection of them to you here!
I was immediately greeted by this when opening the first box, and my theory is that it’s indicative of the man behind their existence. Frank Beckwith was librarian for The Leeds Library throughout the periods the dust covers hail from, and had a great affinity for Yorkshire literature and history. He also had an unshakable loyalty to collecting newspaper clippings and hiding his own scribblings in them – of which I found many examples here! Perhaps compiling this pamphlet was his original motivation for collecting these materials? The text attached to this cover was still present, which was rare for this box, and was published for a short run amongst interested local fiction aficionados.
This gorgeous cover belongs to Festival at Farbridge, published in 1951. It was author-playwright J.B. Priestley’s sixteenth novel. Priestley was born in Bradford in 1894 and is perhaps most famous for his play An Inspector Calls; familiar to anyone who did an English GCSE in the past 15 years! He featured his Yorkshire heritage heavily in many of his works, including The Good Companions – the 1929 novel that gave him his ‘big break’. In World War Two, Priestly worked for the BBC giving morale-boosting broadcasts to the nation (until they were cancelled by Churchill after Dunkirk, reportedly for being too left-wing). Priestley also co-founded the socialist Common Wealth Party in 1942, and his broadcasts are credited with helping the 1945 landslide Labour election victory that lead to the founding of the NHS.
Here is another lovely example of book covers from the period. Second Harvest was published in 1953, joining Naomi Jacob’s prolific library of works which at that time totaled 39 novels. Jacob was a Jewish woman born in Ripon in 1884. Her works often prominently featured female characters and addressed antisemitism and domestic violence. She also had multiple female romantic partners throughout her life – a fact I’m sure Beckwith was not privy to!
Jacob was very politically active, fighting for women's suffrage and standing as a Labour party candidate, and worked for the Entertainments National Service Association during World War Two. She died in 1964, after moving to Italy to help fight her tuberculosis.
This was just a fraction of the lovely and well-preserved dust covers I found in the archive's nooks and crannies. If you would like to see more, or have any other questions about the Library's archives and its materials, feel free to contact me at day-goughn@theleedslibrary.org.uk. The Leeds Library provides free access to our archive for researchers of all kinds, and I would be delighted to hear from you.
All images courtesy of The Leeds Library.