Your conjecture is manifestly correct of course. There is no way to determine if a book was issued in a dust jacket beyond documenting that such is the case. And there are "wrinkles."

Originally, a dust wrapper or dust jacket was intended to protect a new book from its adjective until the volume in question was sold. Having served its purpose it was then often discarded. Many earlier dust jackets feature no printing. Among numismatic works fitting that criterion are Horatio Robinson Storer's 1931 Medicina in Nummis and Richard Bowen's 1942 Rhode Island Colonial Money and Its Counterfeiting, to name but a few American publications. Even a numismatic bookseller employed the practice, witness the 1984 catalogue of the Lester Merkin library.

Modern dust jackets have little to do with solid particulate matter and everything to do about marketing. Plain dust jackets stifle sales. Imagine a bookstore display of the 1931 and 1942 works [1] mentioned above: an unending blob of brown kraft paper. Blah! Contrast that with an image of Tarzan, vanquishing a lion and saving a beautiful maiden, in full color. I doubt any of those are still lying around, mint in their original pictorial jackets.

In numismatic circles, the presence or absence of a dust jacket generally has but a modest impact on value. The opposite is often true in the general world of books, particularly modern fiction. There, an original dust jacket is typically worth more than the volume it encompasses. Many modern novels feature dust jackets designed by talented and famous artists of the day and their presence and, particularly, their state of preservation, is key. Suffice it to say that not only are coins counterfeited. Replicas of older pictorial dust jackets have become a plague in the book world. Luckily, their detection at present is easier for those with a discerning eye, due to the unavailability of the raw materials involved (paper and ink), combined with the obsolete technologies involved.

[1] Neither were commercially published and their paper covers likely stifled sales; decades after publication your scribe purchased multiple brand new copies of both, with dust jackets intact.

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NOTES FROM E-SYLUM READERS: APRIL 17, 2016 (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v19n16a07.html)