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book cover

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Also known as cover, bookcover

protective covering, often decorative, used to bind together the pages of a book

Wikidata facts

Instance of
specialized term
Subclass of
binding
Has part
dust jacket
Image
The St Cuthbert Gospel of St John. (formerly known as the Stonyhurst Gospel) is the oldest intact European book. - Upper cover (Add Ms 89000) (cropped).jpg
Show 5 more facts
topic's main category
Category:Book covers
Commons category
Book covers
has characteristic
decoration
Sources (2)

via Wikidata · CC0

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Encyclopedic overview

Front cover of the St Cuthbert Gospel, c. 700; the original tooled red goatskin binding is the earliest surviving Western binding.

A book cover is any protective covering used to bind together the pages of a book. Beyond the familiar distinction between hardcovers and paperbacks, there are further alternatives and additions, such as dust jackets, ring-binding, and older forms such as the nineteenth-century "paper-boards" and the traditional types of hand-binding. The term bookcover is also commonly used for a book cover image in library management software. This article is concerned with modern mechanically produced covers.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “book cover” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.