Academic libraries strip books of their dust jackets. I discovered this when I got a job at the Santa Rosa Junior College library. The naked books put me off. Public libraries don’t do that, not the ones I knew. I guessed it was a budget thing. It costs money to cover the dust jacket with clear mylar, both in materials and labor. When the mylar gets torn it has to be replaced. Cheaper just to get rid of the dust jacket right off the bat. The dust jacket has almost nothing to do with saving a book from dust — or any other kind of damage.
In a book on the evolution and engineering of the book shelf Henry Petroski gives a different explanation: space. Yes, that dust jacket takes up space. It may look like just two thin sheets of paper but, he says, the amount of “space on [a full] bookshelf [taken up by book jackets was] once calculated to be 2.5 percent.” When you have a huge collection that’s not an insignificant number. For every million books there’s space for what Petroski calls “a small public library” if dust jackets are removed.
SRJC did not have a million books. So they either removed dust jackets because that’s what academic libraries do, it’s become part of academic culture, or maybe I was right the first time and it’s less expensive that way.
“To remove the jacket separates interesting information, such as descriptive copy and photographs of authors,” Petroski says. The dust jacket also preserves the design aesthetic of the time. Books of the early 70s look different from books of the early 80s. They use different fonts, different colors, arrange the information differently, and so on. I think a dust jacket is valuable for those reasons.
But I wasn’t surprised when I got to UC Berkeley and surveyed row upon row of naked books. For Cal maybe it’s space. I was grateful for the paperbacks. You can’t strip a paperback of its color, its author photo, its unique design. Paperbacks don’t do dust jackets.
source:
The Book on the Book Shelf
by Henry Petroski
1999. Alfred A. Knopf, New York
3 comments:
i love dust jackets & keep them as intact as possible on my shelves. they possess an idiosyncratic beauty that accentuates the books they clothe. e.g. the dust jacket for the new thom gunn bio features the poet in closeup wearing mirror shades that reflect the photographer as well as gunn's thin legs. for the subject of the photo is sitting poolside which again highlights the title of the bio, THOM GUNN: A COOL QUEER LIFE. the book would be naked without it!
It's a real loss when the dust jacket is tossed. When I'm reading a book, though, I usually take the dust jacket off. It flops around and often falls off anyway -- unless it's a library book with dj taped on. I've seen that Thom Gunn bio. Yeah, great cover. Naked without it -- but not the good kind of naked!
I read all Gunn's poetry books years ago and like them. A few of his poems got into my personal anthology (as represented on my Best Poems posts). I've nibbled at Gunn's collected letters. Fat book! I met him once at Cal, though I can't recall an actual conversation. I applied for his workshop but didn't get in.
thom gunn is my man! i met him once too at a reading he gave at Sweetie's, a dive bar, in 2003. a year before he died. all the books you stated are really worth their weight. not all our beloved poets are for everyone. de gustibus non est disputandum! but i fully, with all my heart, & whatever intelligence i possess, think gunn is the cat's meow!
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