Publishers sometimes throw book collectors a curve--books that normally are issued in dustjackets are issued without them; books that usually have tipped-in illustrations have none; books that normally have a title-page are published without one. Such books later show up in booksellers catalogs bearing descriptions such as: w/o DJ as issued; w/o tip-ins as issued; w/o title as issued. This simply is the bookseller's way of letting you know that the copy on offer is not defective--whatever is missing was not there to begin with, even though it usually is.
The French edition of Robert Frank's landmark photographic work The Americans, for example, was issued without a dustjacket (it also was quite a different book textually from the English-language edition, having an almost anti-American sentiment):
To take another example: Sir Edward Burne-Jones' The Flower Book usually is found with the plates bound in, although originally it was published with the plates loose, as in this copy currently on offer from The Book Collector's Library:
Most professional booksellers base such a description on their own experience in handling multiple copies of a title over the years, or on descriptive bibliographies that exist for a particular subject, genre or author. The matter can make for some rather pricey mistakes if you're collecting First Editions and the like, so unless you are working with an independent bookseller you trust, you had best make sure that you've done your research before laying out a lot of money for a book that may, or may not, have items missing as issued....
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