Printer's waste paper wrappers.

The longer I spend among books, the more fascinated I become by all the variations of their presentation to the world: the ways their printers, publishers, and owners finished them off (or didn't) in order to help protect them, or to give them an identity, or simply to hold them together.

Lyon Almanacs, 1775 and 1787.

Of course, manuscript fragments and incunabula fragments re-used in bindings are doubly interesting: each has been a book itself and also has been used to protect a later book. 

But sometimes, printers used their own products to bind up their own books. Often enough, printers expected owners to have books bound, and printer's bindings were often intentionally ephemeral, which makes them all the more interesting when they survive.

The two books I've illustrated here are French eighteenth-century almanacs from Lyon, dated 1775 and 1787, and both, I think, are remarkable for preserving the printer's original paper binding wraps or covers. 

That the wrappers are original is especially clear in the case of the 1775 almanac, where the printed text on the wrapper is a close match in format and content to some of the pages in the almanac itself, although some differences suggest the wrapper is made from a sheet from a different printing year.

Regardless, in both cases, the exteriors of the wrappers are printer's waste: uncut sheets of printed pages that might, if circumstances had been different, have become books themselves. In both cases,  this printer has overprinted these waste sheets, in one case with a design of squares, and in the other with a design of triangles. These overprintings partially obscure the waste printing, but the effect is only partial at best.

1775 Lyon Almanac, title page and inside wrapper.

In the case of the 1787 almanac, the wrapper has been backed by an unprinted sheet: the interior pastedowns, then, are blank. 

In the case of the 1775 almanac, as my second picture shows, the inside of the wrapper has been backed with another printed sheet, probably a printed decree or legal document. (Even an ABE search on the printer/publisher, Aime de la Roche, suggests that such documents were a staple of this printer; a WorldCat search is somewhat more difficult to evaluate). 

These wrappers, of course, are fine examples of the recycling of printed materials, but I find the overprinting here to be quite charming. Though the printer must have expected these wrappers to be quickly replaced by these almanacs' owners, they were made visually appealing, even so.