BENGALURU: When I visited the John Steinbeck Center in Salinas in January 2024, it was the 75th year since the publication of Grapes of Wrath, the definitive novel on the Great Depression. I was excited to buy the anniversary edition of the book, with the iconic dust jacket, for $30. The original 1939 first edition with a dust jacket in fine condition would have cost $13,500. One of the most expensive books sold in 2023 was a copy of the classic, The Great Gatsby with a dust jacket for a record $180,000. So, what makes the dust jacket so special and why do books even have one?
Dust jackets first came into use in the 1800s. They were simple, unadorned paper wrappers, and their original intent was to protect books bound in leather or silk on their way from the printing house to the bookseller or library. Once the book reached its destination, the jacket was taken off and thrown away. By the turn of the century, publishers were realising that these relatively plain wrappers offered plenty of space for advertising.
Blurbs featuring synopses of the book and biographies of the author started to show up around 1910. By 1920, illustrated dust jackets were everywhere, and by the mid-20th century, people had stopped throwing them away. And now, if you happen to have a book that dates from before this time frame with the original dust jacket, hang on to it since well-preserved jackets (their condition being of paramount importance) have a high rarity-value.
For a collector, the most valuable jackets are usually those that cover great literary works, such as most of Ernest Hemingway’s titles, and the first editions of books such as Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Prices for dust jackets have skyrocketed in recent years so that even early reprints of certain titles in jackets can command good prices. Conversely, if the book is unimportant or in little demand, the jacket is usually not worth much, but nearly all surviving pre-1920 jackets add some value to the books they cover.
The oldest dust jackets held in the British Library Dust Jacket Collection date from 1919. Because of their ephemeral nature, there are few surviving samples prior to the 1890s. The earliest existing decorative dust jacket is thought to be a wrapper, recently rediscovered in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, for a silk-bound gift book called Friendship’s Offering. It is white with the title in black, enclosed by a decorative border. Prior to this discovery, the earliest known dust jacket was a ‘pale buff paper printed in red’ created in 1833 by the publisher Longmans to protect copies of Charles Heath’s The Keepsake. It even included advertisements for other Longman’s publications, demonstrating how the firm was way ahead of its time in marketing its wares.
Mark Godburn is a bookseller and collector who has written widely about the evolution of the dust jacket in the 19th century. His book Nineteenth-Century Dust Jackets, lucidly written, with useful illustrations, cites many previously unrecorded examples and explodes the myth that dust jackets only came into use in the late 19th century. Another book I thoroughly enjoyed was Martin Salisbury’s The Illustrated Dust Jacket, 1920-1970. It traces how the jacket evolved from its functional origins as a plain dust protector for expensively bound books to its elaboration as an artistic device to catch the eye of browsing book buyers.
During my primary school days, I remember covering my notebooks with brown paper. In many ways, it served the same purpose as a dust jacket. So, when my own book The Invisible Majority was getting published, I wanted a dust jacket, not just for nostalgia but also because I knew that a well-made, custom jacket could make the book look professional and polished!
(The writer’s views are personal)