74 Of Probably The Best Book Covers Ever Created

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.

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.

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.

Although now this cover might seem a bit outdated, it was, at its own time, very striking and novel.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!

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

This must be one of the most adored and marketable book covers. Despite that, there's very little information on its creator Halverson.

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?

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.

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.

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! 

It might seem that this list is dedicated to Paul Bacon's artwork, but hey, if he's so iconic, why the heck not? 

An iconic color palette, a custom-type treatment, and one symbol to capture the book's essence - an excellent and memorable design!

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.