Book publishers have a wide array of cover materials to choose from today—designed for most any application and budget.

By Gretchen A. Peck

For a cloth cover where durability is a must, too, publishers can consider a substrate like LBS’ Buckram—a polycotton blend finished with an acrylic coating, making it the strongest cloth in the industry, according to the supplier.

It was an ICG/Holliston-supplied product—Pearl Linen—that was chosen by Hyperion for the cover of “A Family Christmas” by Caroline Kennedy, intended to be a coffee-table-quality, treasured keepsake. Pearl Linen is made of 100-percent cotton, coated with a double-sided, aqueous filling that makes it particularly amenable to specialty finishing processes—foil stamping, for example.