The Book Blinders

The first known dust-jacket to appear on a book in the UK dates from 1819.   Sadly, almost none of these jackets have survived. The one institution primarily responsible for this vandalism is the British Library, which removed dust-jackets from every book it accessioned, and destroyed almost all of them. As a result, almost no hardbound book accessioned by the Library after the middle of the nineteenth century was in fact presentable in a visual context: no dust-jacket artwork survived to b