Personally, I've always removed dust jackets when reading a book. I also tend to put mylar covers on them, but I still remove the protected dust jacket when reading the book.

Of course the annoying thing about fancy overlaid covers like this one is that they make putting mylar covers on the book a real challenge....

I'm really at a loss for kids books, since many of them (or rather,
all but one on our shelves) are pretty much exactly what they have
printed on the hardcover, and they're just easier to damage.

My best guess is that they predate being able to do pictures on the cover of hardbacks, and umm, that's just the way that they are.

(now, I can see where this elaborate one would tend to attract
people in a bookstore, so for non-kid oriented books, I can certainly
understand).

Of course, sometimes I lose the book and still have the dustjacket.

Unless you made a dust cover to protect the dust cover...

The cover
is really nice and I hope it survives intact to my part of the globe,
but I must admit that I'm more excited about having something new from
Michael Chabon than how pretty the cover is.

Of course, this is a McSweeney's publication, and they have a rep for book
design that playfully pushes at the far reaches of the functional. It's
not like it's going to be sold in stacks at Costco. Bookstores and
readers know what they're getting into.

I always leave the dust jackets on. After all, they're there to protect the book. Anything that happens to the jacket while it's on the book while I'm reading it at, say, a restaurant or a park happens to the jacket and not the book underneath. That's good, right?

(This is one of the downsides to being a graphic designer. I KNOW
why and how, and yet, I can be swayed by fancy packaging, just because
I think it's awesome and I want to have it around. Sometimes to wave in
marketing's face when they go, well, we want something that looks
expensive but can you make this look more boring? I mean, that's never
their exact words--usually what they see is empty space that could be
filled with logos or more text. God forbid we have ART in the design.)

This is lovely. I covet muchly.

Still, it's awfully purty.

Somewhere in my youth I got the notion that dust covers were meant
to be used as bookmarks--I still use them that way (at least on books
of a reasonable thickness). But I, too, have developed the habit of
waiting for the paperback.

At least here the overlapping die-cut bits and pieces and be slipped
wholesale into the plastic wrapping libraries put on all their dust
jackets.

Unfortunately for that, the clear plastic covers used by my library
have an opaque back. Normally this is hidden under the dust jacket, but
cutouts are always a problem.

Yup.

Several books White Wolf published, Back In The Day (when I worked for Crazy Egor) inspired much ire -

The first edition of Wraith: The Oblivion which, cleverly,
had its title in glow-in-the-dark ink. Not so cleverly, said ink was
nearly impossible to read by daylight on the very convoluted cover,
leading to such statements as "Yeah, we've got Wraith, back on the New
Stuph display. Hang on, let me turn the lights out so you can see it."
and "Yeah, we've got Wraith. It's the one you can't see, cause ghosts
are, y'know, invisible."

and

several books in the Werewolf: The Apocalypse line, which had
a tendency to die-cut covers (including at least one hardcover with a
die-cut in it) which were all atrociously prone to mangling themselves
into the scratchy-denty bin.

Friends Don't Let Friends Die-Cut Covers Without Protecting the Die-Cuts... :-)

Whenever I have to do repair on a book with mylar, i strip it off, along with the decrepit strip of dust jacket clinging to the boards.

It may seem counter intuitive, but removing the Dust jacket will help prolong the book's useful shelf life.

Professionally, I find dust jackets mostly useless and an
unnecessary expense, even if some of them I personally find beautiful.

When publishing my book, I decided to compromise and go with a casewrap for the hardback (how's that for some subtle marketing, eh?)

***

As for this cover...
wow! McSweeney's makes some beautiful books*, but this one is just
spectacular. if we get a copy for the library, I might just have to
stick it in the special collection. I don't think I could bare to
discard such a work of art.

_________

* It's unfortunate the writing isn't as good. I don't think I've ever
enjoyed reading any of the McSweeney's books I've bought but they sure
look purty on my shelf.

There are some important clues to Jimmy Corrigan's ancestry on the cover.

They also seem to be a cruel joke by Ware. The details and print are
so small that I have to take off my glasses and use a magnifying glass
to take them in.

As to dust jackets in general, I always leave them on the book to protect the book. The pages are what matter! And I like my books to have a little character. I don't live in a bookstore; my book
jackets don't need to be in saleable condition. I am looking at a few
books from my father's collection right now, and they're charming
because the tops of the dust jackets are a little worn, a little torn.
You can tell the books have been read over and over.

That said, I can't imagine what this jacket would look like in 60 years...

The last trade book (I remember, anyway) this was done on was Lisey's Story, but it's common on children's hardovers.

For my money, the Edward Gorey books have the best use of these. I especially like the cover he did for the New York Review of Books edition of War of the Worlds.

I'm also curious as to what plastic was used to make the shiny
covers on old Avon paperbacks from the 40's and 50's...I remember being
bored and peeling long strips of it off the cover. Of course, it may not have been plastic at all.

Where can one get the mylar covers for hardcover dust jackets that libraries use?

Now, of course, I'm going to have to figure out how to cover it....

(Note another issue -- different words from the title are printed on the different bands, so if a cover band slips around, the words don't line up properly. It is still a handsome book, though.)

Also, I have to agree on the McSweeney's fiction, although I'm not
sure I have a particular quibble with the quality so much as it's not
quite my cup of tea. But they do produce some really beautiful
artifacts.