A lot of book covers look alike on purpose. When a particularly striking image graces a book that catches fire in the hearts and minds of an audience, its aesthetic is inevitably, deliberately applied and reapplied, again and again, until the shorthand exhausts itself. Financially, this logic is airtight. Artistically, it encourages conformity. This is not inherently bad. If a cover invites readers in, the book’s words might open their minds. Everyone wins.
Still, it’s worth celebrating the covers that don’t do that. Throughout my year of reading and browsing, I kept spotting book covers that didn’t look entirely like book covers. Some behaved like warnings, others upgraded themselves to alarms, and at least one embraced the unconsidered visual milieu of a lengthy, textual A.I.-generated overview of its subject. Are these stunts for attention? Were they approved in order to find purchase in the short attention economy? Did they result from the designers’ clandestine efforts to include a trace of personal expression? All of the above, I hope. Reading endures in part for its ability to share multiple interrelated ideas within a contained form. Design can do this too.
Moderation
by Elaine Castillo designed by Lynn Buckley
The book’s title is a familiar word that’s found new currency online and in political speech. Though its design follows a trend of pairing modern type with old art (in this case Vittoria Reggianni’s 1938 painting “Admiration”), the novelty that sets this cover apart is the art’s loud insistence on behaving at cross purposes with all of the objective calm implied by the title. Other designs of this kind emit a wink; this one announces itself with an everlasting scream.
Foreclosure Gothic
by Harris Lahti designed by Adriana Tonello and Rodrigo Corral
This cover is less an invitation to read the novel than an open call to indulge the voyeuristic impulses we might otherwise suppress when it comes to real estate, surveillance footage and/or ghost stories. If you get the creeps trying to figure out the relationship between the glowing figure in the top half and its non-glowing counterpart below, well, that’s the point.
Hot Air
by Marcy Dermansky designed by Janet Hansen
For a satirical romance deploying a crashed hot-air balloon as both symbol and plot device to skewer the billionaire class, it’s a telling choice for the designer to feature said balloon tightly cropped in a state of stretched-to-bursting expansion. It allows sexual frustration to become synonymous with economic inflation. And it looks beautiful: Spotting this on a bookstore shelf from afar, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a piece of misplaced sculpture.
Flashlight
by Susan Choi designed by June Park
We’ve been trained to identify the tilted landscape maneuver on book jackets as shorthand for danger. For anyone who takes the next step and reads this novel, the quieter choices on the front become richer. What was just a landscape might now suggest a flag — only the nationality of that flag, partially obscured by the ocean that upends the characters, is not so assured. It’s a deceptively modest design that honors plot, character and theme in a single gesture that rewards attention.
Harbour Doubts
by Bebe Ashley designed by Jack Smyth
Making readers decipher the title of this poetry collection and the name of its author twice, via two clashing typefaces with overlapping color bands, is an impressively intimate way to get them to act out the title. Merely looking at it for three seconds elicits a reflexive double take to ensure that what you just read is accurate, allowing the design to prompt a live, one-on-one demonstration of doubt in action.
Searches
by Vauhini Vara designed by Linda Huang
It’s counterintuitive to market a book with a presentation this deliberately alienating, even if alienation from the self is one of its key themes. Praise is due for recognizing the opportunity to attract attention by setting the sterile informality of a ChatGPT overview against a sea of other books trying hard to look more considered.
Something Rotten
by Andrew Lipstein designed by Na Kim
An argument could be made that framing an oversize screaming baby on the front of a novel about an oversize screaming baby is an easy layup. I will not dispute this. However, I will submit that cropping this portrait of agony with such uncomfortable proximity to its title poses a familiar question to anyone who has parented newborns: Is this an outcry of existential despair or a passing diaper concern? Coincidentally, the image might also reflect 2025’s preferred mode of expression in the public square.
Six Bolaño reissues
by Roberto Bolaño designed by Michael Schmelling; illustrations by Mike Adams
These are a posthumous repackaging of six books (only four of which are seen here) for the Chilean poet and author whose work and identity as an iconoclast living apart from the literary establishment exist in perpetual conversation. Taken in total, each cluster of drawings on each cover speaks to a writer intent on tying together the language of the street and the cosmic abstractions of the subconscious.
On the Clock
by Claire Baglin designed by Erik Carter
If you’ve ever spent time staring at cheerful fast-food signage after eating fast food — noting the difference between the display’s energetic geometry and the nap that the food compels you to take — the subversion at work between this typography and the novel’s title might feel familiar. The happily rendered drips could be ketchup, sure, but they could just as easily nod to the blood and sweat shed from the main character’s employment.
Shade
by Sam Bloch designed by Chris Allen; photograph by Jason Fulford
“Just find the perfect photo” is a strong oblique strategy when designing covers for diffuse, real-world subjects. Here, we’re presented with a persuasive argument that a book-length exploration of shade is not only justified, but also smartly observed and fun and highly likely to widen your perspective on something that you never think about unless you’re sweating.
Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert
by Bob the Drag Queen designed by Chelsea McGuckin
Here is a story for which suggestions of humor, defiance, joy and music need to be conveyed within milliseconds without excluding the punishing historical continuum in which they exist. Complicating matters, two separate images rendered in two separate styles are in play. Ordinarily, juggling that much in a compact space leads to a cover that is over-designed and overthought. Here, it’s as forthright and confident as the author’s voice.
I Remember
by Joe Brainard designed by David Pearson
The title of this memoir can be identified immediately even though it’s never spelled out in full, thanks to the wise choice to use one of the simplest typefaces ever. Printing the title nine times with different characters missing each time, to underscore the fallibility of its subject, reaches past idle cleverness to seize upon something fundamentally human using only letters. Writing does this too.
Matt Dorfman is an art director at The New York Times Book Review.
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