jacket cover : Java Glossary

aka protective book dust jacket cover, (or almost any combination or permutation of those words). It has always bothered me that the dust jacket covers on my hard cover books eventually get so ratty I have to discard them (the covers, not the books). I set about to see if I could get my beloved  Concise Oxford English Dictionary Luxury Edition covered in transparent plastic the way libraries do. This task turned out to much more of an adventure than I expected. I peppered the people at Brodart, the leading supplier of supplies for doing this with questions. Eventually the clerk their said it would be simpler if she just sent me a free sampler pack to experiment with. I felt embarrassed that I had pestered them so much just to buy one jacket cover so I declined, but she insisted. That was quite generous of them, especially given I would never become a bulk customer. A package about 1 metre (3.28 ft) on a side arrived today. After a bit of fooling around, baffled by the purpose of a bit of stray plastic inadvertently stuck on the jacket I was trying to use, it turned out to be pretty simple after all.

Tips

• The book itself is irrelevant. You are covering the dust jacket, not the book. You have find a protective cover just slightly larger than the dust jacket. When you open up a dust jacket, it is longer than you first expect since not only does it cover the front, spine and back of the book, it wraps around and covers part of the insides of the front and back hard cover. see the image in the top left corner. A typical dust jacket will be 53.34 × 25.40 cm (1¾ × 0.83 ft).
• The protective jacket cover is just a big piece of paper and a big clear plastic sheet, glued together along one edge. You make a sandwich, inserting your dust jacket between them.
• Before you start trying to figure out the steps to apply the jacket, take a good look at it and imagine what the finished product will look like. Knowing where you are headed will make the instructions much easier to understand.
• You fold the protective dust jacket cover to fit. You don’t have to cut it to fit because the folded over flap does not show when you are done.
• When you have everything nicely squared and folded, you use peel-off sticky flaps to hold everything in place.
• You end up with the original dust jacket in a plastic-outside and paper-inside sandwich. When you wrap the finished jacket around the book and around onto the inside of the hardcover, none of the paper is visible.
• How do you make it hold onto the book itself? That is up to you. You could use glue, fibre tape or nothing at all. For my dictionary, I think I will use some fibre tape applied in such a way it does not touch the book proper, just the cover.
• The problem is the tidiest ways to attack the cover damage the book. Here are a couple of inventions to solve that problem:
  1. Use four plastic clips, like large paper clips, that fit near the four outside corners of the hardcover. They would have a sticky pad on either side to stick to the underside of the protective cover.
  2. Use plastic springy U-shaped tubing that you cut into pieces and clip on the top and bottom edges of the book. The springiness closing the groove holds the tubing in place. Then glue the underside of the protective cover to either side. The tubing would have the added function of protecting the exposed edges of the hard cover book. The U arms might be perhaps 1 cm (0.39 in) tall.
• Another way to handle protecting a single book would be to take your dust jacket to Staples, Office Depot or similar stationery store and have them laminate it. The catch is it might be too stiff to fold around a book. You had better try an experiment first since there is no way to unlaminate your dust jacket.
• You might think you could design and print dust covers for your books that don’t have dust jackets. The catch is a legal size page is not nearly long enough for all but the smallest book. Perhaps you could buy big sheets of coloured craft paper and hand decorate them using vinyl appliqué self-adhesive lettering perhaps produced with a Cricket.

Purchasing

You can’t buy just one cover. They come in bundles typically of 10, 25 and 100. Mainly libraries buy these things, and in huge quantities. Unfortunately, the Brodart website is generally unclear when they give prices about how many covers are in the bundle. I suspect it is obvious to most of their customers from the price alone, just your local grocery store does not need to tell you that $4 of butter is one pound.

• Some types you need a precise fit, others adjustable ones can be folded down to size. What counts is the size of the dust jacket, not the size of the book. The precise fit ones give a cleaner-looking edge with more protection.
• For brand new books you use glossy transparent covers. For shopworn covers you use semi-transparent, slightly fogged covers to mask the imperfections.
• You can get light duty or heavy duty for circulated books.
• Some covers have a tubular bulge. I don’t know what these are for. If you find out, please let me know.