As noted in yesterday's post, dustjackets account for much of the value of First Editions, especially First Edition fiction from the 1st half of the 20th century, where the dustjacket may represent 75+% of the value that the marketplace puts on a book:
Faulkner, VG 1st, no dj, U.S. $3000 Faulkner, VG 1st in VG dj, U.S. $25,000
Notwithstanding this pricing discrepancy, dustjackets have always been a bit problematical for both libraries and advanced collectors. As the number of volumes in one's library increases, the amount of shelf space that these thin pieces of paper take up becomes an increasingly large problem. It's not much of an issue when you have 10,000 or so volumes, but it's a very big issue when you have millions of volumes on your shelves.
Many large institutional libraries,therefore, routinely recycle dustjackets that are not believed to be problematic for certain types of titles (e.g., later editions of modern works of science, textbooks, etc.). This not only frees up shelf space, it also reduces the conservation costs associated with keeping both books and their dustjackets in pristine condition (a losing battle in large institutional libraries). This does not mean that dustjackets are immediately tossed in the recycling bin--they often are used in a "New Books" display (in lieu of a shelf full of the books themselves).
Against this, of course, must be set the fact that dustjackets often provide biographical, bibliographical and other important information that may be important to future historians (of the book itself, of culture, of advertising, etc.). Moreover, the cover art on dustjackets often is more important to a book's marketplace success than the text--this is especially true in genres like romance fiction and science fiction:
The very significant pricing disparity between jacketed First Editions and unjacketed Firsts, combined with modern advances in color printing technology, have led the unscrupulous to manufacture facsimile jackets for Firsts that otherwise would be unclothed. This disturbing trend will be the subject of tomorrow's post....
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