Dust Jacket - Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

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. 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, 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. 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.