Wired reported this week that three of the five largest trade publishers are running language models over the parts of a book that are not the book. More than two dozen employees at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette described models drafting publicity material and back-cover copy, image generators making cover art, executives taking out subscriptions and convening sessions for staff to find uses for them — and authors not being told (Adam Morgan, Wired, via Techmeme, 10 October; relayed by Mike Pearl, Gizmodo, 10 October). I have not been able to read the original behind its paywall and am working from two accounts of it, which is worth saying out loud.
The argument has gone, reasonably enough, to consent. One literary agent told Wired that agents now make publishers promise in advance not to push a whole unpublished manuscript through a model to generate promotional copy. “Ostensibly, that was meant to protect authors from tech companies,” the agent said — and then pointed out that it binds the publisher too.
I want to follow the jacket instead. The book trade has a hundred years of paperwork on what a jacket turns out to be worth, and the interesting thing about that paperwork is where the money lands.
The art department
In 1924 somebody in Scribner’s art department — the person has never been identified — commissioned a Spanish illustrator named Francis Cugat to design a wrapper for a novel still called Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires. Cugat was paid $100, which the Smithsonian calls “the princely sum of $100” with the dryness that figure deserves. It was the only book cover he ever designed. He delivered before the manuscript was finished, and Fitzgerald, having seen it, wrote to Max Perkins: “I’ve written it into the book” (Smithsonian Magazine). The original now sits in the Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton.
Whatever else that transaction was, it was a purchase of a service at a price, completed. Cugat had no further interest in the thing. Neither did Scribner’s, beyond selling the copies in front of it.
The shelf-preparation bench
In June 2000 a conservator from the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, Randy Silverman, read a paper at the American Institute for Conservation’s annual meeting arguing that research libraries should stop throwing dust jackets away. His account of the prevailing habit is admirably flat: libraries “generally treat dust jackets as extraneous” and “consequently discard them as part of the shelf preparation process.” His case for keeping them is that a jacket’s “most significant contribution is as state-of-the-art material culture,” supplying “evidence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century trends in marketing and consumerism.” Fewer than twenty pre-1880 examples are known to survive (Book and Paper Group Annual, vol. 19 — conference abstract, selected by committee and not peer-reviewed).
Note the date. Not 1930. In 2000 it was still necessary to stand up in front of one’s colleagues and make the case.
The saleroom
Sotheby’s own guide to identifying Gatsby first editions puts a copy lacking its jacket at roughly $3,000 to $4,000 at auction, and a copy with the original jacket in excellent condition at $350,000 or more. The house calls the design “one of the most celebrated dust jackets in literary history” and describes it as a “central factor in the book’s collectibility” (Sotheby’s).
So the same piece of printed paper costs a hundred dollars to commission in the first room, is removed as a matter of procedure in the second, and in the third carries something on the order of ninety-nine per cent of the object’s price.
What the sequence shows
The money appears in the last room, and not one party in the first two had any claim on it. Cugat was paid off in 1924. Scribner’s sold its print run and moved on. The library that cut the wrapper off and dropped it in the bin was not being philistine; it was disposing of packaging, correctly, by the lights of every system it answered to. Everything the jacket is now worth accrues to dealers, consignors and auction houses a century downstream, none of whom commissioned it, paid for it, or kept it.
Which means a publisher deciding today that cover art and jacket copy are the cheapest things in the building to automate is not making an error of taste. It is reading its own accounts accurately. A trade publisher has never once been paid for a jacket’s long life, and nothing in the way the business is put together would let it notice if it were throwing away the most valuable thing it made this year. Nobody declined to build that; nobody got round to it. The proof is that the institutions holding the objects were still cutting the wrappers off in living memory.
The thing the author’s side got, in the end, was a promise about the manuscript — the part that already had an agent attached to it. The jacket has never had an agent. My guess, and it is only that, is that the in-house design and copy desks go first and go quietly, because the people objecting in Wired‘s account are staff rather than authors, and staff objections arrive without a contract behind them.
Somewhere on a library shelf there is a 1925 Scribner’s first edition in fine condition, correctly catalogued, undamaged, and worth three thousand dollars, because someone at the processing bench followed the procedure.
Sources
- Adam Morgan, Wired, 10 October 2026 — headline and excerpt via Techmeme
- Mike Pearl, “As They Supposedly Battle AI Slop, Major Publishers Reportedly Cover Their Books in It”, Gizmodo, 10 October 2026
- “When F. Scott Fitzgerald Judged Gatsby By Its Cover”, Smithsonian Magazine
- Randy Silverman, “Jackets Recommended: The Case for Preserving Dust Jackets in Research Libraries”, Book and Paper Group Annual, vol. 19, American Institute for Conservation, 2000 (abstract)
- “A Guide to Identifying The Great Gatsby First Editions”, Sotheby’s
- “Celestial Eyes” — Cugat’s fee and the commission date, citing Edward Tenner, The Atlantic, 10 June 2013