Innovative cover design: an exploration of 19th- and early 20th-century publishers’ cloth bindings designs

Abstract

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Renier Collection of Children’s Books provides a rich resource for research into book production as well as social history. Publishers’ cloth bindings have developed in a visually vibrant way that provides clues to the production dates of the books, as well as encouraging reflections on how they were marketed across the Victorian era and early 20th century. Questions also arise, such as, what was the relationship between the reader and cover? How did the cover designs reflect the times in which they were created? And, how different are our paperback era designs to those of the period when cloth was used?