dust jacket

The dust jacket (sometimes dust wrapper or dust cover) of a book is the detachable outer cover, which is usually printed and often illustrated. This outer cover has folded flaps that hold it to the front and back book covers. Often the jacket provides biographical information about the author and offers a summary of the book from the publisher (known as a blurb), and puffs of critical praise from celebrities or authorities in the book's subject area. In addition to their promotional role, dust jackets protect the book covers from damage. However, since they are themselves relatively fragile, and since dust jackets have intrinsic, aesthetic and financial value, the jacket may in turn be wrapped in acetate or another transparent material, especially if the book is a library volume meant for lending out to patrons.

Early history

Before the 1820s, most books were published as unbound sheets which were sold to customers who then ordered and paid for their own bindings. Since publishers did not usually issue bindings, there was no reason for them to issue dust jackets, and in any event most book owners preferred to display their books in their bindings, not hidden behind protective jackets. A few book owners did occasionally fashion their own jackets out of leather, wallpaper, animal fur or other material, and many other types of detachable protective covers were made for books, codexes, manuscripts and scrolls from ancient times through the Middle Ages and beyond. Such covers included decorated boxes, goatskin bags, pottery jars, leather or velvet chemises and ornate carrying cases.

By the last decades of the eighteenth century, publishers were issuing some books in bindings of cloth or paper covered boards, notably small annuals and almanacs. These books were also sometimes issued with detachable pasteboard sheaths, a practice that continued on such books into the 1820s and '30s. These small boxes are sometimes loosely and erroneously referred to as the first dust jackets.

Oldest dust jackets

After publishers' cloth bindings started coming into common use on all types of books in the 1820s, the first true publishers' dust jackets appeared by the end of that decade. The earliest known examples were issued on English literary annuals which were popular from the 1820s to the 1850s. These books often had fancy bindings that needed protection. The jackets that were used at this time completely enclosed the books like wrapping paper and were sealed shut with wax or glue.

The oldest publishers' dust jacket now on record was issued in 1829 on an English annual, Friendship's Offering for 1830. It was discovered in the archives of the University of Oxford by Michael Turner, a former curator and Head of Conservation at the Bodleian Library. Its existence was announced by Oxford in 2009^[1]. It is three years older than the previous oldest known jacket, which was discovered in 1934 by the English bookman John Carter on another English annual, The Keepsake for 1833 (issued 1832)^[2]. Both jackets are of the type that completely enclosed books.

Most jackets of this type were torn when they were opened and then discarded like gift-wrapping paper; they were not designed to be reused, and surviving examples are known on only a handful of titles. The scarcity of jackets of this type, together with the lack of written documentation from publishers of the period, makes it impossible today to determine how widely these all enclosing jackets were used during the 1820–50 period, but they were probably fairly common on ornately bound annuals and trade books.

The earliest known dust jackets of the modern style with flaps – which covered just the binding and left the text block exposed – date from the 1850s, although this type of jacket was probably at least in limited use from the 1820s or '30s onward. This is the jacket that became standard in the publishing industry and is still in use today. It is believed that flap-style jackets were all but universal by the 1880s at the latest, and probably earlier, although the number of surviving examples from the 1850s, '60s and '70s is too small to prove exactly when they became ubiquitous, and again, there are no known publishers' records that document the use of dust jackets during these decades. There are, however, enough surviving examples from the 1890s to state unequivocally that dust jackets were all but universal throughout that decade. They were probably issued more often than not by the 1860s and '70s in Europe, Great Britain and the United States.

Late 19th and early 20th centuries

Throughout the nineteenth century, nearly all dust jackets were discarded at or soon after purchase. Many were probably discarded in bookstores as the books were put out for display. The period from the 1820s to the early 20th century was a golden age of publishers' decorative bookbinding, and most dust jackets were much plainer than the books they covered. For this reason, most people preferred to display their books in their bindings, a habit that had carried over from the earlier era when books were hand bound in leather or vellum. And even late in the nineteenth century there were still some publishers who were not using dust jackets at all (the English publisher Methuen is one example). Some firms, such as subscription houses which sold millions of books door-to-door, probably never used them.

Cloth dust jackets became popular late in the nineteenth century. These jackets, with the outer cloth usually reinforced with an underlayment of paper, were issued mostly on ornate gift editions, often in two volumes and often with a slipcase. Other types of publishers' boxes were also popular in the second half of the nineteenth century, including many made to hold multi-volume sets of books. The jackets on boxed volumes were often plain, sometimes with cutouts on the spine to allow the title or volume numbers of the books to be seen.

After 1900, the economics of publishing caused book bindings to become less and less decorative, and it was cheaper for publishers to make the jackets more attractive. By the 1910s and '20s, most of the artwork and decoration had migrated from the binding to the dust jacket, and jackets were routinely printed with multiple colors, extensive advertising and blurbs; even the underside of the jacket was now sometimes used for advertising.

As dust jackets became more attractive than the bindings, more people began to keep the jackets on their books, at least until they became soiled, torn or worn out. One bit of evidence that indicates when jackets became saved objects is the movement of the printed price from the spine of the jacket to a corner of one of the flaps. This also occurred in the 1910s and early 1920s. When jackets were routinely discarded at point of purchase, it didn't matter where the price was printed (and many early jackets were not printed with any price), but now if book buyers of the 1910s and '20s wanted to save the jacket and give a book as a gift, they could clip off the price without ruining the jacket.

Dust jackets as collectible items

Dust jackets from the 1920s and later were often decorated in art deco styles which are highly prized by collectors. Some of them are worth far more than the books they cover. The most famous example is the jacket on the first edition of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925. Without jacket, the book brings $1,000 or so. With the jacket it can bring $20,000 or $30,000 or more, depending on condition. One copy in a near mint jacket was listed for sale in 2009 for half a million dollars. ^[3] The most valuable jackets are usually those on the high spots of literature. Condition is of paramount importance to value. Other examples of highly prized jackets include those on most of Ernest Hemingway's titles, and the first editions of books such as Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, among many others. Prices for dust jackets have become so inflated in recent years that even early reprints of certain titles in jacket can command good prices. Conversely, if the book itself is unimportant, or at least has little demand, the jacket is usually of little value either, but nearly all surviving pre-1920 jackets add some additional value to the book they cover.

Some collectors and dealers, in an effort to increase the value of a first edition that has lost its original jacket, will take a jacket from a later printing and "marry" it to the earlier one. This practice persists because some customers will pay more for a first edition in a later jacket than they would for a jacketless copy. However, switching jackets muddles the bibliographical record and creates a forgery of sorts.

Notes

1. ^ See "Earliest-known book jacket discovered in Bodleian Library" (Michelle Pauli, guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 April 2009).
2. ^ Carter, author of the classic ABC for Book Collectors, reported his find in the September 22, 1934, issue of Publisher's Weekly
3. ^ See the listing at ABEbooks.com, unsold as of April, 2009.

See also

• Blurb
• Book collecting
• Book cover
• Book design

References

• Pete Masterson (2005). Book Design and Production. Aeonix Publishing Group. ISBN 0-9669819-0-1. 
• Mark R. Godburn's web site, Nineteenth Century Dust Jackets.

External links

• "Dust Jackets from American and European Books, 1926-1947". New York Public Library. http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=arts&collection=DustJacketsfromAmeri&col_id=157. 
• Dust Jacket Artists
• Fake Dust Jackets