The New Thing: Books Without Jackets
View Story On One Page
Print This Story
Share This Story
September will see the publication of three unusual-looking books: Farrar, Straus and Giroux's No Impact Man by Colin Beavan, Viking's Bicycle Diaries by former Talking Head David Byrne, and Graywolf's The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott. What makes these books so unusual-looking is that, even though they're hardcovers, their cover art is not printed on dust jackets but instead stamped directly onto the boards that hug their pages. The result is a handsome, eye-catching look that reflects a heightened awareness on the part of publishers that books these days cannot be counted on to simply sell themselves.
"At a time when there are other forms that people can buy books in, it becomes more important than ever for the physical book to look really attractive," said Viking's Paul Slovak, comparing the embossed orange linen case-wrap that houses Bicycle Diaries to the front of an old composition notebook. "It goes back to this point that people make, that when you have an e-book you kind of just own the file."
Most of the publishers experimenting with jacketless hardcovers, including Viking, FSG, and Graywolf, are consciously taking their cues from the folks at McSweeney's, who have been putting out beautiful books designed in this style for years. For Eli Horowitz, the managing editor at McSweeney's, the method is a means of restoring some of the permanence and singularity to the book as object.
"To some extent," Mr. Horowitz said in an email, "it comes down to the question of what purpose the book is designed for: to be sold in a store, or to be a part of a reader’s life. Even well-designed jackets often feel like advertisements, not actual parts of the object." He added: "Jackets carry all the design, but they feel disposable and often are disposable, the first part of a book to get torn or creased or trampled."
Alvaro Villanueva, a McSweeney's affiliate who designed Mr. Elliott's Adderall Diaries for Graywolf, echoed Mr. Horowitz's point, saying that the energy and resources that publishers expend on designing pretty jackets are in some sense wasted, because people are so used to putting them aside when they're actually reading hardcovers.
"The book jacket is just a throwaway," Mr. Villanueva said. "It gets wrinkled, or it’s just uncomfortable and annoying, and you put it away because you're trying to save it but it gets messed up."
Worse, he added, the undesigned case-wraps that typically house jacketed hardcovers are generally dull and cheap-looking.
"We’re used to the jacket covering something that's ugly," Mr. Villanueva said. "We expect that ugliness there."
As Mr. Horowitz put it: "In practice, this naked state is how a book lives the vast majority of its life, everything past the bookstore infancy: the jacket falls off, gets lost or destroyed, and then you’re left with just the book itself."
Part of the reason for that blandness, intuitively, is the cost associated with doing anything fancier. "You’d be surprised how few options there are, unless you've got oodles of money to spend on color and texture for the paper that covers most of our books," said FSG designer Charlotte Strick, who created the design for Mr. Beavan's No Impact Man. "The manufacturers just don’t have a huge range of these things."
The wager with jacketless books like the ones coming out this September is that the extra money spent will attract attention they might not get otherwise by enticing booksellers to display them prominently in their stores and causing readers to notice them when they're browsing.
"Being distinctive and unusual makes a book more of an object and ultimately more desirable," said Paul Buckley, the art director at Viking, in an email. "Unfortunately many publishing executives are understandably tied to very real world budget issues and are very hesitant to put a little extra budget into creating a package that will stand out from the crowd, which would ultimately help sales."
"There’s something really exciting about seeing stamping directly on the boards," said Ms. Strick, of FSG. "I don't know if I even completely understand why that is. Maybe there's something permanent about it, that kind of makes it feel substantial and special and gives it a certain integrity."
- More:
- Media
Special Times: 'The Business of Green' 
Is Rudy Picking on a Weakling? 
Oprah's Exit: Milepost on the Road to the End of Broadcast TV 
Opening This Weekend: ZOMG New Moon! Plus Sandra Bullock Makes the Boys Cry in The Blind Side 
Gehry Gets Topped Out in Lower Manhattan 
Books without jackets
Simon & Schuster's Free Press provided both book jacket and book cover for the recent release of One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Search for Silence in a Noisy World, which I co-wrote with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton.
The hardcover depicts a section of trail through the lush Hoh River Valley in Olympic National Park, the site of Hempton's self-proclaimed quiet sanctuary. The white book jacket bears a small die-cut opening on the front (yes, one square inch) between the subtitle and title. Through this opening, a glimpse of the rain forest shows through, an invitation to come along.
John Grossmann
Research?
I should be pretty embarrassed if I'd written an article that left out any part of a trend that can't be found in the mall.
No reference to the fact that handsome jacket-less hardcovers are the rule for some European presses (and these are likely the greatest influence on the U.S. publishers who are now adopting the practice)? How about U.S. presses like Open Letter Books, who have seemingly built their business model catering to book-lovers best instincts by on offering literary fiction bound by European-inspired and colorful paper-over-board (i.e., jacket-less) hardcovers at the price of paperbacks?
I greatly look forward to forthcoming Observer articles where we will find out that local coffee shops learned about coffee from Starbucks who invented it in America.
Poorly researched article indeed!
For many years, hardcover mass market books for children have been released as "jacketless". Even the Random House published "Star Wars Storybook" from 1978 was jacketless, so there is some history. It was considered a less classy option for a higher cost licensed product to save on its manufacturing budget. However, why would trade publishers continue to spend $.10-$.50 per jacket on something the reader does not usually retain?
It is time adult trade publishers stick it to the boards as it were and be done with it. Does Mitch Albom's name in a large font really need to have its own Jacket as opposed to it being a case-wrap?
As the blind embossed case wrap went the way of the panda, heavy boards became too expensive, and head/tail bands become more of an option to be discarded, it is time to look seriously at the jacket as something that can also be used as an exception rather than the rule on a publishing list.
When adult trade publishers start using the endpapers for cross promotion and selling ad/promo space, that is when we know publishers are serious about budgets.
Poorly researched article indeed!
For many years, hardcover mass market books for children have been released as "jacketless". Even the Random House published "Star Wars Storybook" from 1978 was jacketless, so there is some history. It was considered a less classy option for a higher cost licensed product to save on its manufacturing budget. However, why would trade publishers continue to spend $.10-$.50 per jacket on something the reader does not usually retain?
It is time adult trade publishers stick it to the boards as it were and be done with it. Does Mitch Albom's name in a large font really need to have its own Jacket as opposed to it being a case-wrap?
As the blind embossed case wrap went the way of the panda, heavy boards became too expensive, and head/tail bands become more of an option to be discarded, it is time to look seriously at the jacket as something that can also be used as an exception rather than the rule on a publishing list.
When adult trade publishers start using the endpapers for cross promotion and selling ad/promo space, that is when we know publishers are serious about budgets.
Poorly researched article indeed!
For many years, hardcover mass market books for children have been released as "jacketless". Even the Random House published "Star Wars Storybook" from 1978 was jacketless, so there is some history. It was considered a less classy option for a higher cost licensed product to save on its manufacturing budget. However, why would trade publishers continue to spend $.10-$.50 per jacket on something the reader does not usually retain?
It is time adult trade publishers stick it to the boards as it were and be done with it. Does Mitch Albom's name in a large font really need to have its own Jacket as opposed to it being a case-wrap?
As the blind embossed case wrap went the way of the panda, heavy boards became too expensive, and head/tail bands become more of an option to be discarded, it is time to look seriously at the jacket as something that can also be used as an exception rather than the rule on a publishing list.
When adult trade publishers start using the endpapers for cross promotion and selling ad/promo space, that is when we know publishers are serious about budgets.
books without jackets
The first time I truly thought about some books not having a jacket was when I first saw my husband's book, "The Third Battalion Mississippi Infantry and the 45th Mississippi Regiment: A Civil War History," published by McFarland & Co., Inc., 2004. The hardcover artwork itself is so beautiful that I did not miss its lack of a jacket. It is easy to keep my personal copy pristine.
Though it is now out in softcover, looking at the cover on their web site shows you just how nice the design is and how nice that it will stay that way more easily than with a jacket.
http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-4344-4
Books without Covers
I love book covers. I cover my favorite books'covers. I love the feel of them. I love reading them. What a shame to lose them. If the designs are used too much for advertising, then design something more tasteful and elegant. Don't eliminate the covers.
It makes little difference to
It makes little difference to me which form a book's wrapper takes, as I tend not to read them--books--by their covers (he said, snootily). However, I have a question about something I don't recall being mentioned in the article: I'm not in the book biz, but aren't "dust jackets" given that name for a reason? Isn't part of their function to keep dust, grime, and stains off the binding? Hence--presuming that the term "dust jacket" isn't just a cynical marketing euphemism--shouldn't it bear mentioning that stamped bindings will lose this protective layer, making the books themselves more prone to damage and/or disfigurement?
Also, how long will publishers be able to resist the temptation to stamp those idiotic accolade blurbs ("Webster's Dictionary is simply a rollercoaster ride of actiony suspensitude from start to finish--Steven 'Steve' Stevens, My Next-Door Neighbor") directly on the board where they can never be escaped or discarded? Even worse, might we start seeing permanent ads stamped on covers as publishers attempt to recoup/lower their expenses without raising prices? Once everyone is doing stamped covers, such covers are no longer distinctive and no longer of any use in themselves as a marketing ploy, so I can easily imagine publishers turning to other strategies in their ongoing efforts to stand out from the crowd...