The UK cover of The Strangers published by Fig Tree last month was designed by Chris Bentham. The illustration in the top half of the cover is by the late Ronald Lampitt.
OK, so “Franz Kafka, life coach” are not really words I ever thought I’d read, but here we are. Anyway, this delightful cover reminded me, in tone at least, of Peter Mendelsund‘s cover design for the 2017 New Directions edition of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa; design by Peter Mendelsund (New Directions / August 2017)
I think this cover photo is from John Edmonds’ series “Hoods” from 2016. which in turn reminded me of the cover of Citizen by Claudia Rankine designed by John Lucas and featuring a photograph of David Hammon’s artwork In the Hood from 1993(!).
Fried egg covers are a thing apparently? The cover of Gunk by Saba Sams published by Bloomsbury in May, which also features a fried egg, was designed by Greg Heinimann. (There was also Sinem Erkas‘s cover for One Sun Only by Camille Bordas published by Serpent’s Tail in January)
Boy A by Jonathan Trigell; design by Sinem Erkas (Serpent’s Tail / August 2026)
The fun 80s sci-fi airbrush vibe of this cover reminded me of Tyler Comrie‘s cover for Two Truths and a Lie by Cory O’Brien from last year. (And if anyone can think of another cover with a rabbit in a eye design let me know. I’m sure there is one)
Depopulation by Marina Closs, translated by Thomas Bunstead; design by Alban Fischer (Bellevue Literary Press / August 2026)
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell; design by Emma Pidsley (Macmillan / May 2026)
Sorry this image isn’t the best. I’ve seen versions where the pink really pops. I’m sure it looks amazing in person. The pink and the dots reminds me of the cover for The Eternal Dice by César Vallejo designed by Pablo Delcan and published last year by New Directions (and on my notable list!).
Oh and the cover of the US edition of Fever Dream published way back in 2017(!) and which I seemed to have entirely overlooked at the time (yikes!) was designed by Rachel Willey.
This just got released in the US in August, which is why it popped up on my radar. I feel like it’s a day-go counterpart to cover of The Hill by Harriet Clark designed by Na Kim!
There not really the same, but the phases of the moon reminded of the cover of How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu designed by Will Staehle for William Morrow & Co. from a few years back.
Thanks to Sarah Wasley at Granta for providing the credits for their recent covers. I probably should’ve guessed this particular photo (‘Annie Morton, Forte dei Marmi, Italy, 1995, No.2’) was taken by Juergen Teller, especially given the book is set in the London art world of the 1990s.
This reminds me of something but I can’t remember exactly what. Maybe the cover of Rabbit Islandby Elvira Navarro designed by Gabriele Wilson? I don’t know.
OK, so two quick things about this cover: one, it immediately made me think of the Nicole Kidman “Eyes Wide Shut” poster (which it doesn’t really look like?), and two, I really like the ambiguity of which way she is looking.
Bait by Eugenia Ladra, translated by Miriam Tobin; design by Gray318 (Daunt Originals / June 2026)
Hi. Hello. I hope you’re all keeping well. This month seems to have flown by so I apologise for rather rushing this out at the last minute.
I was reminded this week there are people in the world (some of whom should know better) who think that all contemporary book covers are boring and banal. I don’t really know where to start with arguments like this. It just seems objectively false to me?
Anyway, I hope these posts help dispel some of those notions and you enjoy this month’s selections….
I took a long-planned week off in March, so this month’s post was somewhat cobbled together around that trip and somehow we’ve ended up with lots of great covers to show for it! I should take vacation more often! There’s some particularly fun typography, some nice illustration, and some of the usual weirdness. Enjoy!
I had a hell of time trying to remember what this reminded me of, I think it is Jeffery Alan Love‘s illustration for the cover of Wolves by author Simon Ings published by Gollancz way back in 2014.
Coincidentally, the cover of Wolves and other Simon Ings titles from Gollancz were among the ABCD Award winners in 2015, and if you’re interested in reading about this year’s ABCD awards, which took place earlier this month, Vyki Hendy has a write up at SPINE.
Hey. I hope you’re keeping safe and well, especially my friends and colleagues in snowy NYC. Thanks to everyone who helped with images and design credits this month — it’s been a really busy month so I really appreciate it!
Oliver’s own novel, Head of Household, is out from Simon & Schuster in the US this month too. The cover was designed by Christopher Brand, and you can read a conversation between the two about the design process at LitHub.
Favorita by Michelle Steinbeck; translated by Jen Calleja; design by Henry Petrides (Faber & Faber / February 2026)
This reminded me of the cover of There Is No Place For Us by Brian Goldstone designed by Anna Kochman for Crown, which featured in March’s post. I’m no Barnett Newman, I do like a bold stripe.
Unfit by Ariana Harwicz, translated by Jessie Mendez Sayer; design by Erik Carter (New Directions / October 2025)
Dan Jackson also designed a new cover for the paperback edition of The Employees by Olga Ravn out next month in the UK from Penguin, which weirdly kind of looks like a Joan Wong collage, but could also be part of a dismembered / disembodied limbs on covers trend? I’m struggling to think of too many examples off the top of my head. Alban Fischer‘s cover design for My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabbarova? But that’s not out until next year. I’m sure there are a couple of others out there. I will have a think on it.
I am very late to this one, but the art is fun and it kind of fits with recent trends so I didn’t want to leave it out. Let me know if there is a design credit to add.
Interestingly, Shannon Cartier Lucy’s art was also used on the cover of Worry by Alexandra Tanner designed by Alicia Tatone for Scribner from last year…
It’s been another busy month here, so apologies for the slightly scattered post. It includes a few covers that I missed earlier in early in the year, and a few other bits and pieces. I hope everyone is doing OK. Here are the covers…
It looks like this was actually the cover of the editions originally available in New Zealand and Australia in 2023, so apologies for being so late to it.
They are obviously very, very different books, but the cover Bear Witness reminded me of the cover for Going Home by Tom Lamont designed by Jared Bartman published by Knopf earlier this year.
Are green covers with pink type a thing now? There’s also the cover of All the Parts We Exile by Roza Nozari designed by Lisa Jager for Knopf Canada which came out in February…
Another (mostly) green cover, with some pink type here!
Sarah’s (also mostly green with some pink!) cover for Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi, published this month by Yale University Press, also caught my eye, but I couldn’t source a hi-res image for it in time for the post…
Both this and the cover for Disappoint Me were featured in a New York Times piece about recent books that are part of a painting + bold sans-serif cover trend.
The Longest Way to Eat a Melon is also an addition to the yellow type trend. The cover of The Slip by Miriam Webster designed by Typography Studio, out next month in Australia from Aniko Press, hits both trends too… (Do paintings of animals count as a separate trend from painting of people?)
This made me think of transferring newspaper print with pink silly putty, which probably hasn’t been possible for decades. I am ancient and made of dust.
Spine Magazine has brought back its round-up of recent university press covers too if you’re interested.
Weepers by Peter Mendelsund; design by Thom Colligan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / June 2025)
This reminded me of the cover of The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane designed by Na Kim for FSG a few years ago (the colour palette of which is similar to a lot of Na’s paintings funnily enough!).
Peter Mendelsund‘s memoir/monograph Exhibitionist is available from Catapult this month too. I think Peter designed the cover for this one himself (with Corbusier inspired stencil type?).
The Washington Postrecently toured Peter’s apartment and talked to him about the book.
Hey, I hope you’re keeping safe, well and warm (or cool!) wherever you are.
If you missed it, my first post of 2025 was a look back at some of last year’s YA covers. You can find my 2024 list of notable literary covers here. Both posts got me thinking more generally about these lists. Do I need to change things up? Or stop altogether? Several other sites are posting lists that do much the same thing mine, and they are all starting to feel too alike. I don’t have answer, and I don’t really know I would do differently. I’m struggling to post once a month as it is. For now at least I’ll keep posting the covers that interest me. It’s just something that’s on my mind, and I have other projects I’ve been neglecting, so I’m curious if you have opinions.
Anyway, this month’s post is a bit of a short (but good!) one, and includes a couple of covers that I missed in 2024 for one reason or another. Enjoy!
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht; design by Sinem Erkas (Profile Books / November 2024)
I do really like this cover. It looks great! But it also looks a lot like non-fiction, especially when compared to the cover of the US edition (Liveright, October 2024) designed by Jason Heuer. They look like completely different books!
And speaking of Jason Heuer, he’s made a series of fun videos talking about embarrassing moments from his early graphic design career. You can find them on YouTube and Instagram. In the second episode Jason talks about his first book design credit…
It is the time of year for lists and I should’ve been done weeks ago, but I am late and already well behind the pack. Apologies for that.
I admire Matt Dorfman‘s ability to whittle his list down to a dozen covers for the New York Times. I imagine it takes him a lot less time for one thing, but I’m sure Matt still agonizes over every cover. It requires a level of discipline and restraint that I do not possess to keep it that tight year after year.
PRINT’s list of best book covers of 2024, compiled by editor-at-large Zachary Petit, is also long. It’s a 100 covers. Last year it was 50.
I’m not trying to throw stones here. We are all seeing more covers than we used to. There are more books for one thing. But they’re not just something we just experience in print in anymore. You don’t have to go into a bookstore or read the newspaper or magazine to see them. They’ve become something we see and share all the time online. Designers are promoting their own work and (slowly) getting more credit for it (although there is a lot more to be done in that area. Publishers — credit your designers!). My monthly round-ups are now one of several you can choose from.
And it is not like my list is short. This year it features work by 48 designers — more than half of them women — and 86 covers (plus a couple of supplementary images).
The consensus seems to be that it was a decent year for covers, and it’s hard to argue with other people’s selections even if I don’t love them all.
It is telling though that 100 of LitHub’s selections were individual picks. There are covers on my list that are not on the anyone else’s despite their length. So while I think we agree there were lots of good covers, I’m less certain we entirely agree on which ones were actually the outstanding ones.
A recent article Spine argued that there is a battle between minimalism and maximalism going on (you can find Spine’s end of year list here by the way). I think that could be true. Different approaches work for different audiences. But I also think it’s messier than that. I get the sense that publishers are less sure of what they want and what sells (certain genres notwithstanding).
It has been a rough year for a lot of publishers, so there is undoubtedly a lot of uncertainty, and no small amount of anxiety. I could go on about why that it is (and the publishing’s self-inflicted wounds) but, in short, what I think we’re also seeing with book covers is more meddling and less direction.
Anyway, I don’t want to end this on a bleak note. This year was shit enough. Despite it all, there genuinely were a lot of good covers in 2024, and some that I did think we’re outstanding. A couple of them made me laugh, which was no small thing. It was a strong year for several individual designers in particular and, despite the pressures, many produced work that was recognizably theirs. I thought there were more interesting covers coming out of the UK and Ireland (that mercifully wasn’t just about the inks or the finishes!), and there were some fun Canadian covers too.
Thanks, as always, for reading, and I hope you’re all keeping safe and well. Happy Holidays!
Holy Winter 20/21 by Maria Stepanova; design by Oliver Munday (New Directions / October 2024)My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar; design by Oliver Munday (Knopf / February 2024)
Mammoth by Eva Baltasar; design by Anna Morrison (And Other Stories / August 2025)
MILF by Paloma Faith; design by Jack Smyth (Ebury / June 2024)
Also designed by Jack Smith:
Lobster by Hollie McNish; design by Jack Smyth (Little, Brown / March 2024)Neu Klang by Christoph Dallach; design by Jack Smyth (Faber & Faber / May 2024)
I also have to give a special shout out to the cover for Paper Boat by Margaret Atwood (Chatto & Windus / October 2024). Suzanne commissioned paper art by Nathan Ward to design a template for a paper boat that could be cut out from the dust jacket and stuck together.
