dust jackets and under cover

by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com)

one of the things i love about digging in bins of old crappy discarded books is finding treasure. specifically entire GENRES of treasure that i’ve never noticed before. when you’re presented with a ton of interesting junk to examine, you start to see patterns. sometimes you start to see patterns of thought that you’ve always known about and accepted as always being there – like it grew on a tree – and warranted no more notice than that.

i love old crummy low budget/high commercial impact book cover design. as the technologies and markets and economics of book publishing wax and wane and surge and grow and then take massive turns left and right, just about anything and everything has been attempted to make the product marketable and attention-grabbing. simple things like ‘dust jackets’ were created to simply reduce wear (and value) in a hard cover hand bound book. in fact, it was developed by anonymous readers simply trying to protect the valuable book for future resale value. it consisted of no more than a piece of ‘foolscap’ (a piece of scrap paper – like butcher paper) folded round the actual cover. so simple. absolute cultural genius.

eventually, these crude handmade ‘dust covers’ grabbed the attention of the book manufacturers and they began to provide them to their buyers as part of their sale. at first, they were generic and blank. but, then (obviously) some marketing dude (maybe a bored art director) said, “why don’t we start putting stuff no the paper so people don’t have to remove it to see what book it is?” thus was both the modern publishing standard known as the ‘dust jacket.’ nowadays, we often buy and sell ‘collectibility’ of an old book by the quality of the condition of the old dust jacket by itself.

another thing on old books we assume ‘grew on a tree’ and otherwise seem to ignore is the hot foil stamped (and mylar stamped ) embossed art on a book cover. usually, we no longer see it at all because the dust jacket covers it entirely and we never bother to remove the thing to see what’s under it. most hardcovers are bound in a treated cloth and is the solid blank cover of whatever color the cloth selected. in the past, covers were bound in leather and stranger materials (canvas, wood, etc.) but the inexpensive and durable qualities of cloth swamped the market and it’s rare to see anything other than cloth bindings on a ‘hard bound’ book cover today.

originally, the hard cover had the same ‘identification’ problem as a dust cover – you couldn’t tell what book it was at first glance. you had to open it to identify it. on a bookshelf, this can be an enormous problem. so, the practice of hand-lettering the name on the spine began. soon, they figured out technology to allow using moveable printing type to be used to transfer gold foil (gold leaf) onto the spine using heat instead of glue. after that, it was no great step forward to also put the name of the book on the cover itself.

after that simple innovation, the decorated book cover was born. hand tooling, embossing, tip-in, sculpting, painting, weird applied materials – just about anything you can imagine was applied to decorate and identify (and sell) book covers. the art deco period produced astonishing great book cover decor, for instance. so, it was not just an antique technology. we still do it even today.

so, as i dig through a huge bin of neglected and discarded books, you start to see absolutely great book cover design. and i’m not talking illustrators and painters like most people mean when they say ‘book cover design’. I’m talking about those foil-stamped/mylar embossed designs and type treatments on the actual cloth hard covers. they’re everywhere and usually hidden from view. and they can be so damn cool.

this one i show you here is from a 1966 edition of j.g. ballad’s “the crystal world”, published by farrar, strauss & giroux publishing. it seems to be a first edition, but i imagine it’s much more likely a book club edition. the format and cheap quality of the paper and binding points away from a real publishing house first edition hard cover. one problem with the copy i found is that the original dust jacket is long gone – and that is usually where they indicated it was a ‘book club’ edition. in the olden daze of yore, you could join “book-of-the-month” clubs and every month like clockwork, you would get a nifty new book in the mail via a subscription rate. it was cheap and easy and you could specialize interests, too. for instance there were several ‘science fiction’ book clubs out there. i think this is probably one of them.

in the collector world, the ‘book club’ editions, though perfectly solid and readable (and even lovely) are considered worthless crap. very very few collectors will do more that turn up their noses at them. they’re junk. that’s why i often stumble into hu

iles of these ‘book club’ editions in really great condition. people often hold on to things thinking they are worth something and then find out they are worth nothing. since they can’t sell them, they toss them into the goodwill bin. then i get to see them. usually, the hoards of professional pickers that swamp all the thrift stores ignore them as well (no sale value), so they just sit there. that’s where i found this copy (for 10¢).

i picked it up because i love reading j.g. ballard (brilliant stuff. he’ll soon be recognized and studied in literary circles as a master author of this era). but, i also grabbed this because of that great mylar stamp on the had black cloth cover. a ‘mylar’ hot stamp is differentiated from a ‘foil’ hot stamp for a simple reason. the ‘foil’ is actually extremely thin sheets of colored metal (like ‘gold’ is real gold) pounded to the cloth surface utilizing heated metal type to make the stuff adhere to the surface. a “mylar” stamp uses a more modern plastic material that operates exactly the same way. but, with ‘mylar’ you have the additional benefit of having any color of the rainbow to choose from (and even weirder stuff than that.)

this whole process is often referred to as an “emboss” by the unsophisticated non-designers. that because the metal type used to heat up and stamp the material into the cloth surface is soften allowed to SLAM into the flat surface too hard (old school printer’s consider his bad. it puts enormous wear on the cams and crushed the metal type over time). but we all love the way the stuff INDENTS in to the hard surface and subsequently demand it. that’s why we often call it an ‘emboss.’ frankly, you don’t even need foil or mylar or even ink to make an ‘emboss’. the word refers to the dent only.

this book cover “the crystal world” is cheap (like the book) and sparingly decorative (no info other than a line picture). it was hidden under a dust jacket and therefore seldom ever seen. so, the designer here (in this case adrienne onderdonk dudden) took the opportunity to flex her design muscles and created a simple little crystal pattern moving in from the upper left (and totally unexpected) corner. it’s a little disconcerting because it looks like it’s invading the page and is actively coming toward you. since the story line is an apocalyptic tale of the entire planet turning crystalline, this image says so much and is so brilliantly done that i had to grab it for my crap files.

this is a cheap and uncollectible piece of discarded pop culture. this book is worth less now than when it was first published. it’s trash. landfill. thrift stores are filled to the brim with this sort of ignored junk. and it’s wonderful cultural dialog. once you start to look for them, you find treasure after treasure after treasure. my example here sports this wonderful and brilliant little touch (hidden from view) and just waiting for somebody to notice it. it simply screams “look at me! i think, therefore i exist!” great stuff.
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AC: …also, by the way, when old school letterpress printers printed this stuff on their valuable equipment, their goal was to just barely touch the hard paper surface so lightly and so exactly (but still apply the ink solidly and cleanly) they called it “KISSING the surface” (notice the complimentary slang term) of the paper. that was the mark of a real letterpress craftsman – work that look identical to offset printing. funny how we turn things upside down with hindsight, isn’t it?