Reprise of the Stamped Cover

Monday's New York Observer had an article about the "new" trend in publishing--eliminating the dust jacket and stamping directly on the cover of a hardbound book.

The New Thing: Books Without Jackets

There has been some discussion of this among the rare book community on the Exlibris listserv. One of my comments was that the design that illustrates the article, No Impact Man, appears to be a stamped paper quarter cloth binding similar in format to what Sarah Wyman Whitman was designing for Houghton in the 1880s.