Dusting Off a Treasure

When a librarian at Bodleian Library in Oxford dusted off an old book, she got a big surprise. She had stumbled upon the earliest existing book dust jacket–the 19th century encasing of a book–now dated at 1830. Oxford had apparently acquired the jacket—for a book called Friendship’s Offering—when it purchased a lot of books in 1892, but no one had noticed it until now.