The Life and Times of the Dust Jacket January 25, 2012

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 wrapper Most 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…

A Landmark in Book Design August 20, 2010

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…

The Unbearable Whiteness of Book Covers January 21, 2010

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…