Why dust jackets?

There are those who regard dust jackets as little more than packaging. When they acquire a book, they discard the dust jacket as one might discard the box a bottle of cough syrup comes in, then place the product itself on the appropriate shelf.

At one time, this may have even been the sensible attitude toward dust jackets. Dust jackets have been around for only about a century. Before that books were published without them, and nobody felt shortchanged. Dust jackets came about as a marketing scheme, a way to put attractive illustrations, complimentary blurbs and summaries of the contents of that particular book and others to tempt book buyers. They were all about advertising, not dust. As Paul Collins points out in Sixpence House "If you store a book properly, standing up, then the jacket doesn't cover the one part of the book that is actually exposed to dust, which is the top of the pages. So a dust jacket is no such thing at all."

Because dust jackets were, in fact, just advertising wrappers and, because made of paper, easily worn and torn, most of them were thrown away by book owners, if not at first, then later. That means that old books with their dust jackets still intact are relatively rare, and thus became more valuable to collectors than the same books in the same condition without dust jackets. Today a rare book without its dust jacket is worth much less than one with a dust jacket. Even a ratty dust jacket can enhance the resale value of a good book.

Of course, most of the books we purchase will never be worth more than what we paid for them, with or without their dust jackets. Just the same, most of us now keep the dust jackets and try to keep them in good shape ... just in case.