Book Jackets :: Essays Papers

Book JacketsBook jacket, book cover, spread jacket, dust cover. They are all words that describe one fair innocuous thing the thing that covers the hard cardboard cover of a book. The book jacket was developed for practical purposes only to protect books from dust, insects and some other harmful entities. However, as geezerhood progressed, the book jacket has become a separate part of the book itself and the reading experience. The book jacket has morphed into non only an addendum used to help sell the book, but in addition into a piece of art in and of itself. Classic books such as Ralph Ellisons The Invisible Man , Joseph Hellers Catch-22 and newer titles such as Michael Crichtons Jurassic Park and cronk Palahniuks Lullaby . Theres even so a celebrity book jacket power in our midst its hard to miss Chip Kidd and his eclectic and midpoint catching designs gracing the shelves of bookstores and libraries across the country and the world. The book jacket has come a long way of life since its early inception as a guardian of books it has become the first step in the reading experience.Although book covers experience been decorated for many years, it wasnt until the 1800s that book jackets came into existence. Book jackets first appeared in England in the nineteenth century, in a culture that was still discovering the rules of consumerism. Their early development came about in fits and starts, constrained by cultural inhibitions that are at once difficult to understand. When decoration was present on the outside of the book, it took the form of every blocking onto binding cloth, or pasting printed root sheets onto the front and back boards (Powers 6). Up until the advent of book jackets at this time, the decorated covers of books were quite popular and even produced celebrities of book cover design. Aubrey Beardsley and Sarah Wyman Whitman were popular book cover designers of the 1800s. Pasted paper designs started appearing on books as early as the 1 830s which soon gave way to two colored textured designs and gold stamping in the 1840s and 1850s. As the years progressed, the use of text and colored ink was simplified and became commonplace on book covers around the world. The transformation of book design owed much to the humanities and Crafts movement, which revered the book as an object both functional and aesthetic, a part of everyday life yet worthy of care and adornment.