Great War Dust Jackets
Bruce Bairnsfather
1887 -
The War’s leading cartoonist
He served as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 3rd Warwickshire Regiment as a Machine Gun officer until being invalided home in 1915 suffering from the effects of Chlorine gas & shell shock sustained at Ypres. Posted to Divisional headquarters on Salisbury Plain he started to draw his famous cartoons for the Bystander magazine. Now considered too valuable an asset for troop morale he was dispatched to various fronts to record the soldiers of other countries in action. Although he continued to publish ‘Old Bill’ related material until his death, here I’m only showing those publications directly related to the War.
I’d like to thank Mark Warby of the Bruce Bairnsfather site for supplying many of the images shown here. http://www.brucebairnsfather.org.uk/
Grant Richards, London 1916 & Putnam, New York 1917. 50,000 copies of the UK edition were published followed by numerous reprints.
Bystander 1917. A compilation of the first 4 ‘Fragments’. below Putnam 1917.
Grant Richards, London 1919 & Putnam, New York 1919. Published too late & in far fewer numbers than ‘Bullets’, this title is far scarcer, particularly in it’s jacket, this being the only copy I’ve seen.
Hodder 1916, 1916 & 1917. Three of Captain A.J.Dawson’s volumes of War stories, illustrated by Bairnsfather.
Hodder 1916.
Below are the original wrappered issues of the 8 volumes of ‘Fragments’ published by the Bystander between 1916 & 1919.
Cassell 1916 (by A.J.Dawson) in card wrappers.