The Book Blinders - Hardcoverby John Clute (Author) 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