[Dust Jacket Scrapbook]

Between 1910 and 1920, Clara B. Mowry, librarian at the Providence Athenæum, pasted nearly 900 dust jackets from contemporary British and American novels into five large scrapbooks. The collection as a whole provides a detailed window into a formative decade in the early 20th century, when dust jackets evolved from plain paper covers into colorful graphic tableaux. 

The discovery of one of only a handful of jackets known for the first edition of Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera (1911) is one of the “serendipitous rarities” preserved in this remarkable collection.