Quezi

Jun
23
2009

What is the history of book cover illustrations?

Old book covers, mostly from the Ohio Preservation Council: "The World" 1848, "Drifting" 1881, "Huckleberry Finn" 1885, "Their Canoe Trip" 1889, "Two Girls" 1900, "House Behind the Cedars" 1900, "Candle-Lightin' Time" 1901, "The Sky Blue" 1903 (PD)

Perhaps surprisingly, book cover illustrations don’t go back very far. Not so long ago, before the 1820s, books were usually sold without any cover. Just a stack of unbound printed sheets. You would then go to a bookbinder and commission a binding and cover. Books were expensive, and the additional cost of a hand-crafted binding and cover was well worth it to preserve the book.

By the end of the 1820s, it had become commonplace for publishers to sell their books pre-bound with covers stiffened by board and covered with cloth or paper. The title, and sometimes a block illustration, could be stamped onto a cloth cover in gold leaf, or a printed sheet (also often with gold leaf) could be pasted onto a paper cover. The illustrations were of necessity rather basic, because the production process didn’t allow for fine detail, so the artist used silhouettes, simple line drawings, and geometric shapes.

Eventually the techniques of the poster artists and their lithographic printing process became used for book covers, and multi-color covers became possible. Reflecting their poster-art heritage, the designs were still simple, and remained so when cover design was in turn influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, then by the Art Nouveau movement.

Around 1830, dust jackets had begun to be added to protect the covers. At first these dust jackets wrapped all the way around and were sealed with wax, but during the second half of the 1800s the current design (a single sheet with flaps) was adopted and the dust jacket became the norm. These dust jackets generally just duplicated the design of the cover, and were almost always discarded immediately as packaging. For this reason, an 1800s book with a dust jacket can today fetch ten or twenty times the price of one without its dust jacket.

Book production continued to become cheaper, but the mass production techniques used after 1900 made the production of fancy covers more expensive. On the other hand, the production of “cheap and cheerful” dust jackets became practical and economical, and marketing became more important. Dust jackets became more decorative, serving as eye-catching enticements to buy. Some people started to keep the dust jackets, but it was not until the 1950s that people generally retained the dust jacket as an integral part of the book. Since the 1950s, an attractive and attention-getting dust jacket has become an essential marketing tool, and some great examples come from that era.

More recently, fewer books are being made with dust jackets, as it has again become economical to produce full-color, robust, integral covers.

Even in the digital age the cover illustration retains an important role to help identify and market a book when it is listed on the website of an internet retailer.

Where can I find images of book cover illustrations?

From the 19th Century:

Mark R Godburn has a gallery of Nineteenth Century Dust Jackets
The Grand Valley State University has a gallery of high quality scans of old book covers including their spines
The Ohio Preservation Council has a page of old Ohio book covers

From the 20th century:

The New York Public Library has a digital collection containing over 2000 European and American covers from 1926 to 1947
Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC have lots of carefully cleaned-up scans of old dust jackets including the flaps and spine
“Total Cardboard” has a book cover design gallery, full of eclectic stuff
A Flickr pool features “Old-Timey” paperback covers
The Book Cover Archive features over a thousand mostly-modern covers

And finally, my favorite of all is the War of the Worlds Book Cover Collection, which contains hundreds of cover images from the many editions of this work that have been published from 1898 to now.