The Picasso of Dust Jacket Design

His name was Ted Kauffer.

From a story on Booktryst...

From 1928 through the early 1950s, Kauffer designed thirty-one dust jackets for the Modern Library, including: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio; Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward; Arnold Bennett's The Old Wive's Tale; Boccaccio's Decameron; Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh; Cervantes' Don Quixote; Clausewitz's On War; Du Maurier's Rebecca; Falkner's Sanctuary, Light in August, and Go Down, Moses; Theophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin; Hammett's The Maltese Falcon; Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions; Huxley's Point Counter Point; Henry James' Portrait of a Lady; D,H. Lawrence's Women in Love; Maurois' Disraeli; Moby Dick; Palgrave's Golden Treasury; The Best of S.J. Perelman; Rabelais; Spaeth's Guide to Great Orchestral Music; Dracula; Sterne's Tristam Shandy and A Sentimental Journey; Arthur Symonds' Life of Michaelangelo; Thackeray's Henry Esmond; Richard Wright's Native Son; and Young's The Medici.

"In Kauffer's hands the poster (or the book jacket, which for him was a mini-poster) was designed to be interpreted rather than accepted at face value. In this regard he continually struggled with the paradox of how to meet his creative needs, his clients' commercial interests and his viewers' aesthetic preferences, all in a limited period of time. In a speech before the Royal Society of Arts in 1938 ...Kauffer candidly explained his methodology and resultant angst:

"When I leave my client's office, I am no longer considering what form my design or my scheme will take, but the urgent fact that I only have so much time in which to produce the finished article. I find this irritating, and am often overcome by a feeling of hopelessness about the whole business. On my way home I think, Will my client understand what I propose to do? Will he understand I may not give him an obvious, logical answer to his problem? Does he suppose I have magical powers, or does he believe that I can solve his sales problem as simply as one might add two and two together and make four?"

Good Show, Sir

Only the worst in sci-fi/fantasy book covers.

The $175,000 Dust Jacket

Booktryst discusses F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and what it goes for at auction.

From the piece...

The incredibly rare and desirable dust jacket to the first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is coming to auction via Sotheby's-New York Library of an English Bibliophile Sale Part II on October 20, 2011. It is estimated to sell for $150,000-$180,000. An excellent copy of the first edition, first printing of The Great Gatsby, a book that in near-fine/fine condition sells for $7,000-$10,000, is included with the dust jacket.

The dust jacket is in the corrected first state, i.e. the "j" in Jay Gatsby on the rear panel was printed in lower case and carefully hand-corrected in ink to upper-case by the publisher. No uncorrected copies of the first state dust jacket are known to exist. In the second state of the dust jacket the "J" was corrected by the printer.

This copy of The Great Gatsby sold at Bonham's-New York, June 10, 2009, lot 3252, for $182,000.

Facsimile Dustjackets, LLC

Facsimile Dustjackets, LLC sells, well, facsimile dustjackets of rare and valuable books.

From the site...

I spent over 20 years in commercial printing working with images in traditional and
digital pre-press departments and manipulating film and computer files for printing
on offset presses. I have found that the skills I developed during those years have
been a huge asset in achieving the results I want with these jackets. In June of 2001
I left the company I was working for to focus all my time on these jackets. In fall of
2002 I put together my web site and I had Black and White Books remove my
listings from AbeBooks.

As of August 2011, I have scanned over 35,000 different titles. If you include
variants and duplicates, I've scanned well over 50,000 jackets. Many of these will
never make it onto my website as some are too damaged to restore, some so
common that it is not logical to restore them, and some so obscure that I'm likely
never to get a request for them. However, these jackets are still an important
component to the Dust Jacket Archives.

Offering facsimiles of these jackets is how I support the Dust Jacket Archives
project and is a way that everyone can have access to these great jackets. People
order jackets for many reasons. They’ve been used as props in plays or movies
and for bibliographic resources. Family members of the authors or artists have
purchased them as well as publishers who wish to produce or reissue a book. I’ve
had magazines purchase them to use in a story they are running. However, these
jackets are mostly purchased by collectors who wish to protect their books with a
quality facsimile, allowing them to enjoy the artwork on a jacket they might otherwise
never see.

20 Most Iconic Book Covers Ever

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Awful Book Covers of 80s Teen Fiction

Enjoy!

Video Games and Book Covers

The greatest video games of our lives introduced us to spellbinding stories and otherworldly beings from the Mushroom Kingdom and beyond, so why shouldn't they have the honor of book covers designed like full-fledged and respected novels?

A gallery of artwork by A.J. Hateley, care of Comics Alliance.