No design is easy and simple, but designing a book cover might just be the hardest task in the world of design. Why so? Well, for starters – a very limited space! Second, the design has to be clear and memorable. And third, it also has to say something about the book itself, and finding a universal visual language understandable to all is no easy feat. Yet, some designers not only match all of the criteria mentioned above, but they also create such iconic imagery that we cannot forget about it for decades after, finally assimilating the design with the book itself. Curious to see the best book covers ever made? Well then, we have a list just for that!
Once you start reading the list below, you’ll notice that a good few of the book covers belong to true classics, such as Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. And it’s no coincidence! These books themselves became literary icons, and by association, their covers became so, too. Along with the classics (both books and their covers), there are also examples of modern literature. And with modernity came a slew of never-before-seen book cover designs that followed the pulse of the art world while also maintaining the aim to reveal the book’s story. And that’s when things started to get more and more interesting! Just take a look at the iconic designs by Paul Bacon (no relation to Francis Bacon), and you’ll see what we’re talking about.
With that said, it might be just the time for you to finally check out the iconic books for yourself. So scroll down below, check out the amazing artwork, and give your vote to the book cover art that got you nodding mysteriously in understanding or left your jaw hanging agape.
#1 Pride And Prejudice By Jane Austen
Yes, Pride and Prejudice has many covers and plenty of editions, but this cover art, which once upon a time covered the first fully illustrated edition published by George Allen, is still the most popular and the most well-loved.
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#2 Brave New World By Aldous Huxley
There are several types of Brave New World covers, including those with pills, machine parts, clones, and Earth. Many of these visually reference Leslie Holland’s original, which is still the most well-known and recognizable, even though Holland is infamous for having never even read the book.
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#3 The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald
This book cover has a unique history and may be the most recognizable in American literature. For starters, Cugat, a Spanish artist, only ever created this cover. Another reason is that he performed the job before the material was complete (for $100), and it seems the book was genuinely affected by the cover.
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#4 Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury
Although now this cover might seem a bit outdated, it was, at its own time, very striking and novel. And now, it is perhaps one of the most iconic!
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#5 The Catcher In The Rye By J.D. Salinger
You may remember that Salinger was very picky about how his books were displayed and that this is the only one with any sort of image at all. While he was writing his most well-known book in Connecticut, his close buddy E. Michael Mitchell lived next door. According to rumors, Salinger read aloud passages of the book to his friend as he worked on it before asking him to create the cover.
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#6 A Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams
Yhis lithograph, which is a part of the permanent collection at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, was first used as a cover for Williams’ play back in 1947. The artwork was created by Alvin Lustig, and the edition was published by New Directions.
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#7 To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee
This first edition cover is still what you’d get if you, say, went online to buy Lee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning classic right now, even though it has been translated into more than 40 languages and has sold over 40 million copies.
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#8 Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison
As far as literary classics go, Invisible Man is a little unusual because it has had a ton of fantastic covers and very few offensively awful ones. However, the first edition cover remains the most recognizable—possibly due to McKnight Kauffer’s previous work as a poster artist.
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#9 Psycho By Robert Bloch
Bloch’s novel’s typography was so well received that Alfred Hitchcock bought the rights to it to promote the movie; it also impacted Saul Bass’ opening credit sequence. A truly iconic artwork!
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#10 Catch-22 By Joseph Heller
There have been a few redesigns of Catch-22 here and there, similar to To Kill a Mockingbird, but the original has endured. Paul Bacon’s version is simply iconic in so many ways.
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#11 The Godfather By Mario Puzo
This cover has benefited by being used to sell the film adaptation, which in this case was the highest-grossing movie of 1972 and, at the time, the highest-grossing movie ever made—not to mention one of the most influential. This is similar to how Psycho’s promotional usage of its book helped that movie’s overall success. Not a horrible formula for iconicity.
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#12 In Cold Blood By Truman Capote
Fujita’s cover for Capote’s book is almost identical to its first version. Just one minor thing was changed – in the draft version, the ‘hatpin’ was bright red, but Capote told Fujita to make it more burgundy because, in the book, the ‘crime wasn’t so fresh.’ If you read it, you know what they were on about!
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#13 The Hobbit By J.R.R. Tolkien
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#14 I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings By Maya Angelou
This must be one of the most adored and marketable book covers. Despite that, there’s very little information on its creator Halverson.
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#15 Slaughterhouse-Five By Kurt Vonnegut
Although the Dell paperback edition from the 1990s has largely supplanted this one in schools, another Paul Bacon classic that has been retrieved numerous times still holds its own in the t-shirt business. Have you ever noticed that the second ‘S’ is flipped over?
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#16 A Clockwork Orange By Anthony Burgess
Although the majority of the book covers on this list are first editions, David Pelham’s paperback edition of A Clockwork Orange was released ten years after the novel’s initial release. Stanley Kubrick forbade Penguin from using any of the movie’s Philip Castle-designed poster elements in the new edition, so Penguin’s art director, David Pelham, commissioned an entirely new one. It was a tie-in edition to coincide with the release of Kubrick’s film adaptation.
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#17 1984 By George Orwell
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#18 The Little Prince By Antoine De Saint – Exupéry
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#19 Jaws By Peter Benchley
Another illustration of a design concept that was so excellent it permeated the entire book. Editor Tom Congdon and creative director Alex Gotfryd decided on a stark typographic jacket after Bantam’s salesmen rejected Benchley’s first cover idea, which was “a peaceful unsuspecting town [shown] through the bleached jaws of a shark,” in accordance with Benchley’s own vision.
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#20 Jurassic Park By Michael Crichton
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#21 A Teaspoon Of Earth And Sea By Dina Nayeri
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#22 The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath
Harper & Row’s first American edition introduced Davida as the unofficial Bell Jar font, which can now be found (along with the rose motif) on quite a few book editions. And that’s what we call an iconic design!
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#23 The Handmaid’s Tale By Margaret Atwood
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#24 The Goldfinch By Donna Tartt
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#25 Portnoy’s Complaint By Philip Roth
It might seem that this list is dedicated to Paul Bacon’s artwork, but hey, if he’s so iconic, why the heck not?
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#26 All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace In Virginia Woolf By Katharine Smyth
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#27 The Snowy Day By Ezra Jack Keats
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#28 The Psychopath Test By Jon Ronson
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#29 Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone By By J.K. Rowling
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#30 Song Of Solomon By Toni Morrison
An iconic color palette, a custom-type treatment, and one symbol to capture the book’s essence – an excellent and memorable design!
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#31 The Color Purple By Alice Walker
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#32 The Unbearable Lightness Of Being By Milan Kundera
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#33 The Grapes Of Wrath By John Steinbeck
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#34 The Animorphs By K.A. Applegate
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#35 This Is How You Lose The Time War By Amal El-Mohtar And Max Gladstone
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#36 A Princess Of Mars By Edgar Rice Burroughs
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#37 Loneliness By John T. Cacioppo And William Patrick
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#38 Night Shift By Stephen King
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#39 The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso By Dante Alighieri
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#40 All My Friends Are Dead By Jory John And Avery Monsen
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#41 The Craftsman By Richard Sennett
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#42 Atlas Shrugged By Ayn Rand
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#43 Instructions For A Funeral: Stories By David Means
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#44 Flowers In The Attic By V.C. Andrews
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#45 Thick: And Other Essays By Tressie McMillan Cottom
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#46 When You Are Engulfed In Flames By David Sedaris
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#47 An Ethics Of Interrogation By Michael Skerker
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#48 American Psycho By Bret Easton Ellis
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#49 More Than This By Patrick Ness
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#50 kaddish.com By Nathan Englander
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#51 Face Of An Angel By Dorothy Eden
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#52 A Cultural Dictionary Of Punk By Nicholas Rombes
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#53 You Only Live Twice By Ian Fleming
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#54 Resistance By Barry Lopez
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#55 The White Album By Joan Didion
No tall iconic designs have to be overloaded by detail; some preceded minimalism and created their own visual aesthetics, thus becoming real icons of book cover design.
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#56 Joseph Anton: A Memoir By Salman Rushdie
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#57 Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings By Jorge Luis Borges
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#58 I’m Glad My Mom Died By Jennette McCurdy
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#59 From The Memoirs Of A Non-Enemy Combatant By Alex Gilvarry
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#60 Aerogrammes By Tania James
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#61 Kidney For Sale By Owner By Mark J. Cherry
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#62 One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest By Ken Kesey
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#63 The Hate U Give By Angie Thomas And Amandla Stenberg
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#64 To The Lighthouse By Virginia Woolf
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#65 Interview With The Vampire By Anne Rice
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#66 The Mothers By Brit Bennett
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#67 A Little Life By Hanya Yanagihara
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#68 Frankenstein By Mary Shelley
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#69 Everything Is Illuminated By Jonathan Safran Foer
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#70 Tree Of Codes By Jonathan Safran Foer
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#71 Know My Name By Chanel Miller
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#72 Shatter Me By Tahereh Mafi
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#73 The Stranger By Albert Camus
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#74 Insanity By Andre Gonzalez
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