I just bought a used out of print book on Unicorns with a nice Dust
Jacket.  I have repaired the tiny knicks on it, but the glossy
exterior is scratched every which way.  Is there any way to polish
scratched glossy paper?

(I removed the glassine stuff over the dust jacket that looked like it
had been put on by a library)

Thanks much?

I worked for several years in a used book store. We tried many methods
of scratch-removal on dust jackets, and we never found anything that
helped. Some techniques made things worse. A customer once suggested
that we try Turtle Wax. It did fill in the scratches, but it left the
dust jacket feeling greasy to the touch, and looking kind of smeary.

Pinkfreud-ga ,

Thanks much for the heads up.

In the Turtle Wax Line of thinking, did you try Armor-All?

I really doubt that any kind of wax or lacquer will help the
situation, and you stand a good chance of damaging the dust jacket by
applying coatings to it.

socr2, your best bet to preserve the current condition of the dust jacket.

You can get the plastic/mylar jacket covers from various sources, one
is through brodart.   You might want to go to your local used store to
see if they can brodart your book for a small fee.

Brodart indeed does sell library type jackets and I had them send me a
"free" sample pack ($4.95 shipping and handling).  Incredibly the
package arrived via some kind of express system in 2 days!

There are archival quality covers in the sampl package and I used one
to great effect on the book cover.  The only problem was, the covers
were all shorter than my cover.  So I left the back inside piec
unprotected.  Unfortunately this meant that there was an unsecured
rippable piece of plastic exposed at the edge of the back cover. 
Question to myself what to do now?

So I decided to go to Kinkos and get cover laminated.  The nice young
girl attendant humored me through adding a backing piec of per to the
cover, and it all worked out pretty well.  The only problem is the
cover is a bit thick, and hard to bend.  No matter, into the microwave
it went.  Of ourse this almost ruined the lamination over the metallic
painted title, but not much of a loss, and the cover now was foldable
in the right places.  Next, I put it in a vise between two boards, I
have yet to see the outcome.

Safe to say, that even though this a solution, it is not one for a
book collector as a laminated cover probably ruis its value.  However,
when giving a used book as a gift, a smartly repaired laminated cover,
might look brand new.  Another problem is the thickness of the
lamination, perhaps thinnes lamination systems are available than
Kinko's generic.

Finally I had a thought about possibly removing the scratches on the
cover without lamination, but with a lamination machine.  How about
rmoving the filmm from the machine and just letting the cover run
through hot rollers, perhaps this will melt the surface of the cover
and smooth out the scratches.  For a smaller book, putting the cover
in the paper bin of a laser printer or copier then printing a blank
page, might do the same thing.  That is, the covers run through
heating rollers and might melt out scratches.  Of course try this only
on a nonvaluable cover.

Here's Brodart's protective covers website with a link to free samples:

http://www.shopbrodart.com/site_pages/bjc/default.htm#

Sorry about the spelling errors in the last post.