The decorated cloth cover of The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1881. A good example of Victorian decorated cloth. The binding serves both to protect the book and advertise it.

A book cover is any protective covering used to bind together the pages of a book. The covering may be of paper, or hard paper boards, or even plastic. The boards may be covered with paper, cloth or leather. They may be laminated, with a plastic layer onto paper.