The dust jacket of a book is the detachable outer cover, usually made of paper and printed with text and illustrations. This outer cover has folded flaps that hold it to the front and back book cover

Book cover

A book cover is any protective covering used to bind together the pages of a book. Beyond the familiar distinction between hardcovers and paperbacks, there are further alternatives and additions, such as dust jackets, ring-binding, and older forms such as the nineteenth-century "paper-boards" and...

s. Often the back panel or flaps are printed with biographical information about the author, a summary of the book from the publisher (known as a blurb

Blurb

A blurb is a short summary or some words of praise accompanying a creative work, usually used on books without giving away any details, that is usually referring to the words on the back of the book jacket but also commonly seen on DVD and video cases, web portals, and news websites.- History :The...

) and puffs of critical praise from celebrities or authorities in the book's subject area. In addition to its promotional role, the dust jacket protects the book covers from damage. However, since it is itself relatively fragile, and since dust jackets have practical, aesthetic, and sometimes financial value, the jacket may in turn be wrapped in another jacket, usually transparent, especially if the book is a library

Public library

A public library is a library that is accessible by the public and is generally funded from public sources and operated by civil servants. There are five fundamental characteristics shared by public libraries...

 volume meant for lending out to patrons.

Early history

Before the 1820s, most books were published as unbound sheets and were generally sold to customers either in this form, or in simple bindings executed for the bookseller, or in bespoke bindings commissioned by the customer. At this date, publishers did not have their books bound in uniform "house" bindings, so there was no reason for them to issue dust jackets. Book owners did occasionally fashion their own jackets out of leather

Leather

Leather is a durable and flexible material created via the tanning of putrescible animal rawhide and skin, primarily cattlehide. It can be produced through different manufacturing processes, ranging from cottage industry to heavy industry.-Forms:...

, wallpaper

Wallpaper

Wallpaper is a kind of material used to cover and decorate the interior walls of homes, offices, and other buildings; it is one aspect of interior decoration. It is usually sold in rolls and is put onto a wall using wallpaper paste...

, fur, or other material, and many other types of detachable protective covers were made for codex

Codex

A codex is a book in the format used for modern books, with multiple quires or gatherings typically bound together and given a cover.Developed by the Romans from wooden writing tablets, its gradual replacement...

es, manuscript

Manuscript

A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

s, and scroll

Scroll

A scroll is a roll of parchment, papyrus, or paper, which has been drawn or written upon.Scroll may also refer to:*Scroll , the decoratively curved end of the pegbox of string instruments such as violins...

s from ancient times through the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

 and into the modern period.

At the end of the 18th century books began to be issued in plain paper-covered boards, sometimes with a printed spine-label; this form of binding was intended to be temporary. Some collections of loose prints were issued at this period in printed paper wrappings, again intended to be temporary. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, publishers started issuing some smaller books in bindings of printed paper-covered boards, and throughout the 1820s and 1830s some small popular books, notably annual gift-books and almanacs, were issued in detachable printed pasteboard

Card stock

Card stock, also called cover stock or pasteboard, is a paper stock that is thicker and more durable than normal writing or printing paper, but thinner and more flexible than other forms of paperboard. Card stock is often used for business cards, postcards, playing cards, catalog covers,...

 sheaths. These small boxes are sometimes loosely and erroneously referred to as the first dust jackets. True publisher's bindings in cloth and leather, in which all, or a substantial part of, an edition were bound, were also introduced shortly before 1820, by the innovative publisher William Pickering

William Pickering (publisher)

William Pickering was an English publisher, notable for introducing cloth binding to British publishing before 1820.Pickering began working as an antiquarian bookseller before 1820, and quickly moved into publishing...

.

Oldest dust jackets

After publishers' cloth bindings started coming into common use on all types of books in the 1820s, the first 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

Wrapping Paper

"Wrapping Paper" is a song with music composed by Jack Bruce and lyrics by Pete Brown, performed by Cream and originally released as a single in 1966 with "Cat's Squirrel" as the B side. It is featured on The Very Best of Cream...

 and were sealed shut with wax

Wax

thumb|right|[[Cetyl palmitate]], a typical wax ester.Wax refers to a class of chemical compounds that are plastic near ambient temperatures. Characteristically, they melt above 45 °C to give a low viscosity liquid. Waxes are insoluble in water but soluble in organic, nonpolar solvents...

 or glue

Glue

This is a list of various types of glue. Historically, the term "glue" only referred to protein colloids prepared from animal flesh. The meaning has been extended to refer to any fluid adhesive....

.

The oldest publishers' dust jacket now on record was issued in 1829 on an English annual, Friendship's Offering for 1830. It was discovered at the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library , the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library...

 in Oxford by Michael Turner, a former curator and Head of Conservation at the Library. Its existence was announced by Oxford in 2009. It is three years older than the previous oldest known jacket, which was discovered in 1934 by the English bookman

Bookman

Bookman may refer to:* Bookman , a character in the manga series D.Gray-man* Bookman , a person who engages in bookselling* Bookman , a person who loves books...

 John Carter

John Carter (Author)

John Waynflete Carter was an English author, diplomat, bibliographer, book-collector, antiquarian bookseller and Vice-President of the Bibliographical Society of London. After attending Eton College, he studied classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he gained a double first...

 on another English annual, The Keepsake for 1833 (issued in 1832). Both jackets are of the type that completely enclosed the 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 very hard to determine how widely these all-enclosing jackets were used during the period from 1820 to 1850, but they were probably common on ornately-bound annuals and on some 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 in at least limited use some years earlier. 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 in general use by the 1880s, and probably earlier, although the number of surviving examples from the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s 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 1870s 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, or when they were sold; there is evidence that this was common practice in England until World War I. The period from the 1820s to 1900 was a golden age for publishers' decorative bookbinding, and most dust jackets were much plainer than the books they covered, often simply repeating the main elements of the binding decoration in black on cream or brown paper. For this reason, most people preferred to display their books in their bindings, much as earlier generations had displayed their library books in their gold-tooled individual bindings, usually in leather or vellum

Vellum

Vellum is mammal skin prepared for writing or printing on, to produce single pages, scrolls, codices or books. It is generally smooth and durable, although there are great variations depending on preparation, the quality of the skin and the type of animal used...

. 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 cheap books door-to-door

Door-to-door

Door-to-door is a sales technique in which a salesperson walks from the door of one house to the door of another trying to sell a product or service to the general public. A variant of this involves cold calling first, when another sales representative attempts to gain agreement that a salesperson...

, probably never used them.

Cloth dust jackets became popular late in the nineteenth century. These jackets, with the outer cloth usually reinforced with an underlayer of paper, were issued mostly on ornate gift editions, often in two volumes and often with a slipcase

Slipcase

A slipcase is a four or five-sided box, usually made of high-quality cardboard, into which binders, books or book sets are slipped for protection. Special editions of books are often slipcased...

. 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, fashions in, and the economics of, publishing caused book bindings to become less decorative, and it was cheaper for publishers to make the jackets more attractive. By around 1920, 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 1920s wanted to save the jacket and give a book as a gift, they could clip off the price without ruining the jacket.

Supplementary bands

In Japan, books frequently come with two dust jackets – a full-sized one, serving the same purpose as in the West (it is usually retained with the book), and a thin "obi" ("belt"; colloquially "belly band" in English), which is generally disposed of and serves a similar function to 19th century Western dust jackets.

Similar bands occasionally appear in the west, for example in Palookaville

Palookaville (comics)

Palookaville is a comic book written and drawn by cartoonist Gregory Gallant, better known as Seth, and published by Drawn & Quarterly. The first issue appeared in April 1991 and it has been irregularly published ever since...

 #20.

21st century

The impact of e-book

E-book

An electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...

s on book covers was the focus of a CBS Sunday Morning segment on December 19, 2010.

Dust jackets as collectible items

Dust jackets from the 1920s and later were often decorated in art deco

Art Deco

Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...

 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

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...

, 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. 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

First edition

The bibliographical definition of an edition includes all copies of a book printed “from substantially the same setting of type,” including all minor typographical variants.- 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

Forgery

Forgery is the process of making, adapting, or imitating objects, statistics, or documents with the intent to deceive. Copies, studio replicas, and reproductions are not considered forgeries, though they may later become forgeries through knowing and willful misrepresentations. Forging money or...

of sorts.

External links

• Dust Jacket Artists