How To Estimated a Book's Age: Part 1. An Antique Books Guide

It is a useful skill to be able to guess the age of a book from it covers.

If you are searching for books (online or in shops) then to be able to estimated how old a book is just from the covers can save a lot of time and wasted energy.

This is the first part of a longer guide which will show you through the covers, the title page and other features how to estimate the age of a book with reasonable accuracy.

The covers are the most obvious way to tell a book's age and will be seen first.

Some can be tricky as they might not be conventional in style but generally they will follow patterns set by each era.

Below are a range of books from various eras with description for each - hopefully you will learn a bit more about the type of designs to look for in each age group.

Modern (1970+)

Modern books are usually identifiable for their clean, white pages but the covers too can tell us if a book is modern. This age group is most obvious as modern books are worlds apart from older ones.

Paperbacks will generally be clean and shiny, sometimes using gold foil to give a touch of style.

hardbacks will invariably have dust-jackets which will often be shiny.

Faux-Antique

Even during modern times publishers are still replicating antique style with books such as the famous Guild Publishing editions (one copy seen below).

An easy way to tell the age of such books is by looking at the page edges which will be far cleaner and neater than real antique books.

Vintage (1930-1970)

This era is quite broad and can be a little harder to guess accurately.

In this age group expect to see few hardcovers with decoration and many with plain covers that came originally with dust-jackets. If dust-jackets are still present they will often be in poor shape and made of flimsy, cheap paper.

Paperbacks will be thin and cheap.

Antique/ True Vintage 1900-1930

This is the era where books begin to get valuable, decorative and classified as antique.
Expect cases of high decoration, gilding to page edges and art-deco styling - look out for bold patterns and vertical lines used as decoration.
Some books can still be plain however, and thus difficult to discern from 1950's or later hardbacks.

Paperbacks are rare in this era and will almost certainly be in poor shape due to the weak binding.

Classic art-deco designs:

Some books will have plainer covers 

The pictorial plate to the front cover is common with this era

Some will begin to look close to late Victorian books in decorative style if they are sub 1910

 Victorian/ True Antique (1870-1900)

This era is where books become genuine antiques.

Despite this you can expect to see some of the boldest cover designs published.

Fine binding is popular in this era and looks very different to standard books due to the leather (or leather effect) binding and higher publication values:

The traditional designs of late Victorian books feature lots of gold, strong fonts and highly decorative covers

 Not all books of this era were decorative however and these can be hard to estimate in terms of age as they may look alike to 1930's or later hardbacks:

Early Victorian (1840-1860)

This era is quite unique as books are generally subtly decorated, without the elaborate embellishment of late Victorian books. Some will feature gilded designs but these will lack the colour and illustration of later publications.

Early antique 1800-1850

This era will start to show its age. Covers are often dark and un-decorated unless they are marbled in which case the same marbled effect will feature on the covers, page edges and front/ endpapers.
Leather binding features heavily in this era too.

 High Antique - Ancient (1800-)

 These books will almost always be bound in leather, calf or vellum and feature very little decoration.
Some books may be re-bound and so look newer than they are but the pages will give away the age.
Covers may be loose or detached and the overall impression of these era books will be of extreme age.
Generally look for damaged and marked leather (brown generally) covers.

Mid 1700's

 Early 1600's 

And that concludes Part 1 of the 'How to estimate the age of books' guide!

I hope it has been helpful or at least a little informative and please share, +1 or comment.