Preserving the Past

I love working with primary sources. I love collecting primary sources. On my current book project, Our God Is an Awesome Brand (Brazos, 2027), I have had the pleasure of collecting and preserving a handful of books (some pictured below). When I first started collecting antiquarian sources, I didn’t really know a whole lot about what I was getting into. Fortunately, one of my mentors, Ken Minkema, took a half-hour to chat with me about talking, meeting with, and purchasing from an antiquarian bookseller. The etiquette of purchasing antiquarian sources really ought to be a post for another time.

However, when I made my first antiquarian purchase, the seller taught me a little bit about preserving my acquisitions. He explained to me the value of covering my acquisitions in a polyester mylar transparent cover. I typically purchase my books online and I often am able to use abebooks.com as the site for many purchases. There have been a handful of books I purchased that came carefully covered in a mylar covering. But many of my acquisitions have not come with such a cover, so I devoted some time to learning the craft of covering my purchases to preserve the dust jackets or covers of my books. It’s rather inexpensive to buy a roll of mylar covering from BroDart and to purchase a bone folder for creating nice folding creases of the paper and cover.

This brief article explains some of the significance related to the importance of preserving antiquarian dust jackets. You see, while it seems rather fashionable to throw away dust jackets these day, history is lost for historians like myself when one does this. (I’ve known a number of friends who do this the first thing when they buy a book.)

Dust jackets provide unique history, especially when we’re looking at twentieth-century works like some of the books that I’ve been working with. Two examples I will provide of note include Harold Lindsell’s Park Street Prophet: The Story of Harold Ockenga and Carl F. H. Henry’s Pacific Garden Mission: A Doorway to Heaven.

You will notice from the following pictures that the dust jackets of these books provide helpful information such as:

1. The books price at the time of publication.
2. Other recent book releases of note that the publisher thought would catch the interest of readers.
3. Information about the author of the book that is noteworthy to readers.
4. Summary ad copy related to the significance of the book and why readers would be interested in reading the work.
5. The style of cover artwork and how artists convey the book title to its audience.

Without doubt, you might come up with other notable reasons for preserving these dust jackets.

Another fascinating benefit that is received in purchasing antiquarian sources is that sometimes previous owners include an inscription recording who they are and often I benefit from the marginalia they create. This marginalia tells me a little bit about what they thought was important about the reading and how they responded to the book at the time that they read it.

The final few photographs are from one of the most important publications in the early founding of the National Association of Evangelicals. Not long after the first meeting in St. Louis, the book Evangelical Action was published to record the very beginnings of the organization and to provide the significant plenary addresses that were given at that first meeting. The copy of Evangelical Action I purchased came with a rather shocking surprise. I purchased this book for a very nominal price. When I opened the book, I was absolutely shocked by the inscription of the book’s previous owner. The owner was John F. Walvoord, second President of Dallas Seminary.

Anyway, I hope you might find this interesting. If you have old books, you may wish to preserve them in mylar coverings. I really recommend that you take just a little bit of time to do so. You might be doing a historian a service.