Book Covers

Book covers are a unique and wonderful art form. It’s no simple task to boil down hundreds of pages of well-considered words into a single image or design and still make it compelling enough for people to want to pick it up. Book design can sometimes make or break the success of a book. It requires wit, knowledge of design fundamentals, and an overwhelming amount of creativity. The task is even more daunting when you are given the assignment to design a best-selling book.

I wanted to see how designers have handled such a task so I looked through the cover designs of the 10 best-selling books of all time. I found hundreds of covers ranging from the mundane to the corny to the excellent. Here are some of the most interesting cover designs I found:

1. The Bible

Literally thousands of editions of this book have been printed, with designs spanning a huge variety of styles. Here are a few representative samples.

2. Quotations from Chairman Mao – Mao Zedong

Mao’s quotations are hugely read in China, and also hugely red in design. Simple, but effective.

3. The Qur’an – Muhammad

Here are a few beautifully ornamented Arabic covers, with some English-translations trying to keep the same flavor.

4. Xinhua Dictionary – Wei Jiangong

Not a lot of originality with this best-selling dictionary.

5. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

Dicken’s great novel is represented with very dramatic illustrations.

6. Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship – Robert Baden-Powell

Interestingly this book is designed using a consistent illustration style across many editions.

7. Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan

Pilgrim’s Progress has been around awhile and it’s cover has been designed in the period’s popular style many times.

8. The Book of Common Prayer – Thomas Cranmer

Lots more red for this simple book of prayer.

9. The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien

Great illustrations and ring/eye references. Some especially fun covers from the 60′s and 70′s.

10. And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie

This fairly-recently written novel has had fewer editions than most of the others, but still some great designs.

And there you have it: book covers from the 10 best-selling books of all time. What did you think (anyone notice an huge use of the color red)? Which ones were your favorites? Do you have any more examples you’d like to share?

Top Ten list compiled from Destican, MentalFloss, Wikipedia and then edited by me.

I recently finished a great book entitled By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design by Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger. The book is an excellent overview of American book design from the early 1900s to 2003. It chronicles the first steps as book design first became important on through international Modernism’s influence on American book design, and finally into the eclectic visions of the 80′s and 90′s as book design dealt with postmodernism.

The cover of this book itself is average to me, although design a book cover for a book about great book covers is obviously a daunting task. The designer decided to use pieces of the covers inside to create a collage of ‘great book covers’ for his cover.

The inside of the book however is beautifully done. Large images of the covers themselves (most being photos of actual books, not computer-generated files, which adds a certain charm and physicality to them) are given plenty of breathing space next to concise, informative text. One of my favorite parts of the book is that all referenced book titles that have corresponding pictures are in BLUE CAPITALS. This makes it very easy to know when to look up and see what the author is talking about. The designers took this second color one step further in helping the reader – end notes are marked in tiny blue superscript. Being a lighter color these are easy to read past as you are reading, but easy to find later when you are looking for them.

All in all this is a great book with some fantastic designs and a good history on book design here in America.

Here are a few of my favorites mentioned in the book:

(Note: Ned and Paul did a great job collecting cover images – many of which can’t be found online (I know, I just looked))

Apt Design

Cover Designs of the 10 Best-Selling Books of All Time