Ten (+1) Favorite Book Covers
(in no particular order)
Designer: Olga Beliaeva, based on a photograph by Serge N. Kozintsev
(A first take on ghosts.)
Designer: Rodrigo Corral
(A second take on ghosts. The tactility of this one is part of the appeal; most of the design is matte, but the text is glossy and slightly raised, as is the small, white, wholly deliberate flaw roughly two-fifths of the way down the cover.)
Designer: Chloe Scheffe
(The title of the book is Adorable; the author, Ida Marie Hede; the publisher, Lolli Editions. There’s a raised semi-echo of the same design on the back cover.)
Designer: Katy Homans, from an image by Cecilia Paredes
(My eyes failed to make immediate sense of this, but once they did, I loved it.)
Designer: Kimberly Glyder
(A second optical illusion cover, which I saw as a dress long before I saw it as the musculature of a throat.)
Designer: Oliver Munday
(The cut-along-the-dotted-lines effect of this is beautiful—and also, once you’ve read the book, which is about a woman attempting facial reconstruction after an acid attack, horrifying.)
Designer: Timothy Goodman
(One of my favorite pure-text covers, and also one of my favorite interactive covers, since it’s impossible for me not to trace the maze with a finger.)
Designer: Kristen Radtke
(A wood-cutty take on animals.)
Designer: Erik Carter
(Another, more illustrative take on animals, from my favorite translation of 2022.)
Designer: Marat Kim
(I couldn’t find a high-resolution image of this jacket without the display stand. Anyway, of the many Master and Margarita covers I’ve seen, this one, with its complementary blue tones and its weird, painterly crowd image, excites me the most, perhaps because…)
Designer: Jim Gurney
(This is my +1. When I was fourteen, I don’t think I had ever seen another book cover that said “you want to read me” as loudly as this one did. I still like the way the fish-creatures are hauling the UPC symbol across the foreground.)