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.
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.
At the end of last year, Joseph Sullivan, curator of the late lamented The Book Design Review, asked me to write about my favourite covers of 2010. I’d always stayed away from such posts in the past because it was Joseph’s thing (his 2009 list is here). But since it was Joe who was doing the asking and The BDR was on “indefinite hiatus,” how could I not?
For various reasons, the list I compiled didn’t get used in the end, and it has sat in my drafts folder for about year now. I now have a list of my favourite covers of 2011, but before I post it I thought I would share that original list from 2010, if only for a bit of context.
I’ve made a few minor alterations to the list I sent to Joe — mostly to better accommodate the series designs and to fully utilise 12 months of regret and hindsight — but it is more or less intact, in spirit at least.
I’ve included the short introduction I wrote for the original piece to explain my process (or lack thereof…).
(Hindsight = 20/20: Apparently I like negative space. A LOT).
The Top 10 Book Covers of 2010
Selecting an annual top 10 of anything — film, music, books — is fraught with difficulty. Not only do you have to sift through all things you have seen, heard, and read over the course of a year (assuming you can remember them all), you must somehow take into account all the things you meant to get to and didn’t (where does one even start?). Worse, you are haunted by the awful, inevitable realization that there were any number of incredible things so outside your usual cultural range that they didn’t even register on your consciousness — the “unknown unknowns,” to borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s immortal phrase. Fate usually decides that you will discover at least one previously unknown work of brilliance exactly 24-hours after you publicly declare your favourites…
Then, having grappled with (ignored) all those thorny issues (and plunged on regardless), there is further problem of what actually constitutes good (let alone “great”) book cover design. Part science, part art (part pleasing interested parties), good book cover design is slippery and alchemical. How does one judge? Using what criteria? Ask 10 designers and you will surely get 10 differently nuanced answers.
I have not read all the books on this list, so I cannot claim authority on appropriateness of every cover to its subject (surely an significant consideration, and yet who would want to limit their list only to the books they had read?), so my criteria, such as they were, included the quality of the overall design — the composition, image selection and typography — as well as originality, swagger and the indefinable je ne sais quoi essential in my opinion to really great covers.
And with that complete abdication from any claim to comprehensiveness or authority, I introduce my picks for the top 10 book covers of the last year with apologies to all the designers — particularly outside of North America and the UK — whose amazing work I have missed, forgotten, or otherwise neglected.
The covers are presented in alphabetically by title.
