The novelist Vincenzo Latronico knew exactly what he wanted for the American cover of his novel “Perfection,” about a disaffected creative couple in Berlin obsessed with curating an exquisite lifestyle.
The original Italian cover used an illustration; the English translation published in Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions had the press’s trademark cobalt blue. For the U.S. version, Latronico had something specific in mind: a 1999 still life of lilies in a plastic Pellegrino bottle by Wolfgang Tillmans, the Turner Prize-winning German photographer known for his intimate portraits and ecstatic images of nightlife.
The image was “sexy and decadent and fun,” Latronico said, “which is the way Berlin felt at the time.”
He assumed a photograph by Tillmans — a favorite of the fashion and music worlds, whose most recognizable work may be the portrait on the cover of Frank Ocean’s album “Blonde” — would be “aiming too high.” He pitched it to his publisher anyway. Latronico was pleasantly surprised when Tillmans agreed to license the image for an amount of money the independent press, New York Review Books, could afford.
“Perfection” became one of the most successful titles ever put out by the publisher, and one of the most talked-about books of 2025. At one point, Latronico had assumed his manuscript, a take on a French novella from the 1960s, was “unpublishable.”
Nicholas During, a publicist at New York Review Books, said, “I do think the design helps in sales,” noting that the book had traveled well on social media.
It’s not just Latronico’s book. Over the past several years, Tillmans’s photographs have appeared on the covers of several “it” books, including “Crudo” by Olivia Laing, featuring a closely cropped image of a fly on the pink carcass of a crab; “Young Mungo” by Douglas Stuart, with an image of a sweaty, exuberant kiss between two young men outside a club; and, more recently, “Hyperpolitics” by Anton Jäger, whose bright yellow backdrop frames a portrait of a woman with her eyes closed, someone else’s hands in her hair.
The photographs seem to pair well with books that are a bit esoteric, experimental or academic, as in the case of Jäger’s book, which examines how culture wars and online outrage have eclipsed political parties and institutions. (It’s now in its third printing.)
That may be because Tillmans’s work “has a certain urgency,” said Julia Schäfer, the design director at MoMA PS1 and a juror in a 2025 book cover competition. “It shows the world we live in, in a way that feels very approachable.”
It’s also a contrast with the sometimes maligned multicolored blobs that dominated the covers of literary prize winners and celebrity book club picks alike in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
“I feel almost awkward for this to be the subject of an article,” Tillmans, 57, wrote over email, adding that he worried a focus on his art could distract from the books themselves.
He said he typically received about 10 licensing requests for books a year. When deciding which ones to grant, he says he considers a book’s focus, quality and connection to his own work.
“Because the cover image is typically the only visual associated with a whole long sequence of type on pages,” he said, “I want to feel that it is the right fit.”
Last year, Tillmans staged an installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that included a display of books that have featured his work on their covers — more than 50 since 1994, including various editions by the filmmaker Gus Van Sant, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the Nobel laureate J.M.G. Le Clézio.
Tillmans occupies a distinctive position within contemporary visual culture because his practice “dissolves the conventional boundaries separating photography, literature and design,” said Roxana Marcoci, a senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York who organized its major Tillmans retrospective in 2022.
Tillmans has worked as a video artist, installation maker and architect. He’s also had turns as a D.J., singer, record producer and occasional book editor.
Many of Tillmans’s favorite collaborations have been with other queer artists and writers: He picked out “Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives” by Walt Odets, Van Sant’s “Pink” and “Young Mungo,” Stuart’s 2022 book about two teenage boys who fall in love, as titles he was particularly proud to have contributed to.
“When Douglas Stuart asked, I thought it was an interesting sign of the times that a major book publisher in the U.K. (but not the U.S.) was willing to put a gay kiss” on the cover of a mainstream work of literary fiction, he wrote. (The British cover featured Tillmans’s 2002 photograph “The Cock (Kiss).” The U.S. cover used a photograph of a young boy underwater by the American photographer Kyle Thompson.)
As books increasingly function as design objects or status symbols, a Tillmans cover can help signal a reader’s sophistication and can turn even an erudite work of nonfiction into a minor cultural phenomenon.
Minh Tran, a writer and podcast producer in Brooklyn, posted a photo on X of himself and another subway passenger tapping their matching copies of “Hyperpolitics” together in an impromptu toast, with a caption saying it was something “that would happen on the g train.” (Tran, though, added an expletive.)
Tran said he’d sought out “Hyperpolitics” because he was genuinely interested in the thesis. But he was also “drawn to the design,” he said. The photograph on its cover, “Love (hands in hair),” is particularly irresistible to book designers: It has appeared on the covers of at least two other books since 2008.
At a literary festival recently, Latronico, the “Perfection” author, was tickled when he ran into Elise Winterthun, a Norwegian critic who told him she had gone looking for his book “just because she was seduced by the Tillmans cover,” Latronico recalled.
But it wasn’t out in Norway yet, and she discovered that the Tillmans cover belonged to the U.S. edition. She settled for the blue Fitzcarraldo edition instead.
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