Getting to design your own book cover is the sort of ultimately maddening power that probably shouldn’t be entrusted to vain mortals. It’s a little like getting to choose your own face.

As well as standout examples from the history of cover design, Mendelsund has filled the book with his own takes on prominent novels, such as Ulysses – exploring the kinds of covers that might be ...

The adage that you can't judge a book by its cover is true, it seems, about just about everything but books. Just look at the collection of jackets on the previous page.

Maybe this cover is intended to speak to that, making the book relatable now. If this was the intention, the design treads a fine line well. It appears as a personification of Plath for new readers.

On a standard Kindle, for example, you can buy a book and pop right over to the first page of the introduction. There is no procession through the cover, title page, and so on.

Louie’s vision of contemporary design, she would tell the graphic-design journal Print in 1989, was that “everything influences everything,” and her own distinctive mélange of influences ...

Every single great book cover she made was different from the rest.” In 2004, Ms. Goldberg was among a group of eminent graphic designers who were asked to design posters that would be sold to ...

Keith Hayes, who designed the Bernadette cover for publisher Little, Brown, told me via email that he didn’t have any intention of using the flat design style or starting a trend when he ...