The books that I have shown here have covers that I admire to be sure, but they are not separate from the content within.
I love the cover of The Sorrow of Angels because it depicts the snow and ice and isolation through which its characters must struggle…
I love this particular cover for The Secret History because it indicates the Greek tragedy which the characters live out…
I love The Robber Bride‘s cover because I don’t understand it. Its mystery points to the all seeing eye of Zenia, but in my opinion, that might very well be our own eye searching for truth…
The Virginian‘s cover is of the man himself, strong and brave and independent, a cowboy unparalleled by any other character written to portray integrity…
I love this cover because Atlas is so strong, and yet so conflicted and weary from carrying the world on his capable shoulders…
Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage has a cover which points to so many parts of the book it took me weeks to notice them all, from the five-fingered hand, to the map of a train station, to the color of each character, to the colorless cellophane which you can’t even see from the picture alone…
The cover of Possession points to the romance inside, as well as the intrigue of a time gone by…
Penguin Classics takes Dickens’ books, such as Bleak House, and makes them all look as bleak as they often are…
and while it’s not a cover, I cannot leave this post without mentioning the illustrations of Ernest Shepherd who ‘decorated’ the original Winnie-The-Pooh. You may look at it and see Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear, with Piglet by his side, but I look at it and see my son and I playing Pooh-Sticks off the bridge over our river when he was quite small.
(Find more posts about favorite covers here.)
