We construct explicit $δ$-bracketing covers with minimal cardinality for the set system of (anchored) rectangles in the two dimensional unit cube. More precisely, the cardinality of these $δ$-bracketing covers are bounded from above by $δ^{-2} + o(δ^{-2})$. A lower bound for the cardinality of arbitrary $δ$-bracketing covers for $d$-dimensional anchored boxes from [M. Gnewuch, Bracketing numbers for axis-parallel boxes and applications to geometric discrepancy, J. Complexity 24 (2008) 154-172] implies the lower bound $δ^{-2}+O(δ^{-1})$ in dimension $d=2$, showing that our constructed covers are (essentially) optimal. We study also other $δ$-bracketing covers for the set system of rectangles, deduce the coefficient of the most significant term $δ^{-2}$ in the asymptotic expansion of their cardinality, and compute their cardinality for explicit values of $δ$.