@Onebyone saves the day!
I buy a lot of quilting magazines, books, and patterns used/second hand but only in person because it’s not unusual to find someone removed the pattern they wanted to keep/use. It really doesn’t bother me, because I can decide if it’s still worth it to me to buy based on what’s still there and I don’t think an 80-95% intact collection of patterns should go in a landfill. I do understand it would be incredible frustrating to find the cover pattern was missing from a “used, like new” book though. Obviously the listed condition was not accurate.
I had my own tiny “what the heck” recently on an old Christmas quilt book pattern from 1981. It was fully intact with all pages including the template page. However the primary block I liked on the cover quilt was this snowflake one. When you get to the pattern they’d completely swapped it for another block! I paid somewhere between $0.33-$1 for it so I’m going to pull through the trauma on this one, but I’m like tsk tsk naughty publisher!