Dustjacket of the first edition of Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun, from the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago library

Does the physical format of a book — its size, shape, weight, the design of its cover and pages, the texture and smell of the binding — influence the experience of its reader? Of course. You don’t have to be a hardcore bibliophile to enjoy an attractively (or even eccentrically) designed volume, or a literary historian to understand how the original format of a book’s publication could have affected its reception by critics and readers.

Dustjacket of the first edition of Geoffrey Drayton’s Christopher, from the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago library

The University of Illinois at Chicago’s library is home to the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, about a thousand books collected over a fifty-year period by the late Jamaican poet (known to his friends as “Dossie”). Most of these books are now-rare first editions. The UIC library has digitised about six hundred dust jackets from these volumes and made the images available online via a searchable database — an admirable resource for anyone interested in Caribbean literature. Your Antilles blogger has just spent a pleasing half-hour browsing the collection.

Dustjacket of the first edition of Derek Walcott’s The Gulf, from the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago library