Noun. dust jacket - a paper jacket for a book; a jacket on which promotional information is usually printed. Also called book jacket, dust cover, dust wrapperMost books printed since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have them. Unfortunately, there are many books that once had them that now don't. For the collector of these modern books the dust jacket represents the Holy Grail of value.One of the most noted examples is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1925 by Charles Scribner's and Sons, the book is considered by many to be one of the great...
A Landmark in Book Design
In 1834 John Murray published Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau. It was the first cloth-bound book ever published with a full pictorial cover.In his book The Collector’s Book of Books Eric Quayle says: “By 1834 the battle was won, and it was then that the first fully cloth-bound book appeared which featured pictorial covers. This was a landmark in book design, and must have caused a considerable stir in the publishing world. The idea seems to have been the brain-child of the author, the eccentric Sir Francis Bond Head."The image above comes from Princeton University's recently acquired copy of...
The Unbearable Whiteness of Book Covers
Meet Sticky. He's the guy third from the right and one of the main characters in the The Mysterious Benedict Society series by Trenton Lee Stewart.Now here's a close up of Sticky from the illustration that appears on the dust jacket of the latest book in the series.Ironically enough, the title of the latest book in the series is The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma, which given that Sticky's color is locked away between the boards sheds a whole new light on the term 'Prisoner's Dilemma'.Here's the product description as it appears on Amazon:Join the Mysterious Benedict Society...