Dust Jackets

You can get THOUSANDS of Dust Jackets.

The Dust Jacket has always been one of my favorite reasons for getting hard cover books. Dust Jacket exploration can take you down many paths— their history,¹ the artists,² the designers, the covers.³ There are several obvious influences that have given us the modern dust jacket. It can be traced back through the pictorial covers of the paperbacks and pulp magazines of the '20s and '30s, of course, to the old dime novels that flourished during the second half of the 19th century. ⁴

Do you have old books without their original dust jackets?

Mark Terry of Facsimile Dust Jackets, LLC has scanned over 60,000 Dust jackets and you can search for those you are missing and buy them!

Mark Terry:

Offering facsimiles dust jackets is how I support the Dust Jacket Archives project and is a way that everyone can have access to these great jackets. Clients order jackets for a variety of reasons. They’ve been used as props in plays or movies and for bibliographic resources. Occasionally, family members of the authors or artists have purchased them as well as publishers who wish to produce or reissue a book. I have had magazines order them to use in the stories they are running. However, these jackets are most commonly purchased by collectors who wish to protect their books with a quality facsimile, allowing them to enjoy the artwork they might otherwise never see.

Here is how Mark Terry does it:

To create a facsimile dust jacket that is a perfect reproduction of the original is, of course, impossible.  However, the techniques I use when creating our facsimiles help in producing jackets that are as close to the originals as possible. ⁵

You can also sign up for updates and learn of the latest additions to the collection.⁶

1. Godburn Mark R. 2016. Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets. England New Castle Delaware: Private Libraries Association ; Oak Knoll Press.

2. Gustafson, Jon, Alex. Schomburg, Harlan. Ellison, Kelly. Freas, Vincent. DiFate, Brian W. Aldiss, George Barr, Stan Lee, and Brian W. (Brian Wilson) Aldiss. Chroma : the Art of Alex Schomburg. Poughkeepsie, New York: Father Tree Press, 1986; Hansen Thomas S and Milton Glaser. 2005. Classic Book Jackets : The Design Legacy of George Salter First ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

3. Powers, Alan. Front Cover : Great Book Jackets and Cover Design. London: Mitchell Beazley, 2001.

4. Matthews, Jack. “And Another Thing ... Dust Jackets and the Art of Memory.” Logos (London, England) 14, no. 3 (2003): 155–58. About These Facsimiles.

5. About These Facsimiles. Facsimile Dust Jackets, LLC

6. Facsimile Dust Jackets, LLC. Browse and sign up for the latest.