I collect old book covers the way some people collect vinyl records. Not the books themselves, necessarily. Just the covers. I have a drawer in my office with about two hundred of them, torn from damaged copies I found at library sales or rescued from recycling bins. The oldest is from 1947, a hardcover mystery with a dust jacket in deep burgundy and gold lettering that feels almost sculptural under your fingers. The newest is from last month, a glossy trade paperback with a cover that looks like every other book in its genre: minimalist, stylish, and forgettable.

Between those two covers sits roughly seventy-five years of design history, and looking at them laid out on my desk tells a story that I find more interesting than most of the books about design I have actually read. It is a story about technology, economics, cultural anxiety, and the slow, messy evolution of how we decide what a book should look like before anyone reads a word of it.

Let me start in the 1950s, because that is where the modern book cover really begins. Before the 1950s, most book covers were fairly utilitarian. Hardcovers had dust jackets, but the jackets were often simple affairs: the title, the author’s name, maybe a small illustration, and a lot of blank space. The covers existed to protect the book and identify it. Selling the book was the job of the bookseller, the reviewer, and word of mouth. The cover itself was not expected to do heavy marketing work.

That changed in the postwar period for several reasons. The paperback revolution, which had started in the late 1930s with Penguin in the UK and Pocket Books in the US, was in full swing by the 1950s. Paperbacks were sold in drugstores, newsstands, and bus stations alongside magazines and newspapers. They competed for attention in a way that hardcovers in bookshops did not. A paperback on a spinner rack had maybe two seconds to catch a shopper’s eye, and the cover was the only tool it had.

This created an entirely new design challenge. Covers had to function as miniature advertisements. They needed to convey genre, tone, and appeal at a glance. And so the lurid, painted paperback cover was born. If you have ever seen a 1950s pulp paperback, you know what I mean. Bold colors, dramatic figures, titles in aggressive typography. A crime novel might feature a woman in a red dress and a man with a gun, rendered in a style somewhere between illustration and propaganda poster. A science fiction novel might show a rocketship or a menacing alien landscape. The covers were not subtle, and they were not trying to be.

I have mixed feelings about this era of cover design. On one hand, the covers were often gorgeous as pieces of illustration. The artists who painted them, people like James Avati, Robert McGinnis, and Mitchell Hooks, were genuinely talented. Their work had energy and emotion and craft. On the other hand, the covers were frequently misleading. A thoughtful literary novel might be given a cover that made it look like a torrid romance. A serious science fiction book might get a cover so garish that readers interested in the actual content would pass it by. The covers sold books, but they did not always sell them honestly.

The 1960s brought a shift that I think was driven partly by design trends and partly by the growing respectability of the paperback format. As paperbacks moved from spinner racks in drugstores to actual bookstore shelves, the covers began to reflect a different sensibility. The painted illustrations did not disappear overnight, but they were increasingly joined by covers that used photography, graphic design, and more restrained typography. The psychedelic influence of the late 1960s produced some wonderfully weird covers, particularly in science fiction and counterculture non-fiction. Hand-lettering and experimental layouts became more common.

This was also the period when the concept of the “author brand” began to influence cover design. Certain bestselling authors, particularly in genre fiction, started to have their names displayed more prominently than the titles of their books. The logic was simple: if readers were buying the book because of who wrote it, the author’s name should be the largest element on the cover. This trend has only accelerated since then. Today, a Stephen King or a James Patterson novel has the author’s name in type so large that the title is almost an afterthought.

The 1970s, in my opinion, were the worst decade for book covers. I know this is a controversial take, but I stand by it. The combination of cheap printing, a preference for muted earth tones, and a general aesthetic of “serious” minimalism produced covers that were often dull and indistinguishable from one another. Literary fiction covers from this period tend to feature a lot of brown, a lot of Helvetica, and a lot of empty space that feels less like a design choice and more like nobody could be bothered. There were exceptions, of course. But as a generalization, if you hand me a cover from the 1970s, I can usually identify the decade within seconds by how boring it looks.

The 1980s changed things again, primarily through the influence of computers on the design process. Early computer-aided design was crude by modern standards, but it expanded the toolkit available to designers. Photographic covers became cheaper and easier to produce. Embossed and metallic effects became popular, particularly for commercial fiction. The 1980s bestseller cover is immediately recognizable: glossy, photographic, with the author’s name in raised metallic type. Think of Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, or Sidney Sheldon. These covers screamed “major commercial release” and they did it through sheer production value.

What I find interesting about the 1980s shift is how clearly it divided the market. Literary fiction covers went in one direction (restrained, artistic, often featuring fine art reproductions or abstract photography) while commercial fiction covers went in another (big, bold, luxurious). The cover became a signal not just of genre but of audience. You could tell at a glance whether a book was positioning itself as literature or as entertainment. This division persists today, though the specific visual codes have changed.

The 1990s brought the rise of Photoshop, and with it a democratization of cover design that had both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, small publishers and independent designers suddenly had access to tools that had previously been available only to large publishing houses with big design budgets. A skilled designer with a computer could produce a cover that rivaled anything coming out of the major New York publishers. On the negative side, the ease of digital manipulation led to an explosion of bad Photoshop covers, particularly in genre fiction. Over-processed photographs, awkward composites, heavy-handed filters. You know the look. It has aged badly.

The late 1990s and early 2000s also saw the beginning of what I think of as the “trend cycle” in book covers. Before this period, cover design trends evolved gradually. A particular style might dominate for a decade or more. But starting around 2000, the cycle accelerated dramatically. A hit book would establish a visual template, and within months, dozens of similar-looking covers would appear. The “headless woman in a pretty dress” trend in women’s fiction. The “big bold sans-serif title on a solid background” trend in non-fiction. The “close-up of a person’s face with part of it obscured” trend in literary thrillers. Each of these trends had a lifespan of maybe two to three years before being replaced by the next one.

This acceleration was driven partly by the speed of digital design (you can iterate a cover much faster on a computer than you can with traditional methods) and partly by the visibility of covers online. When books started being sold primarily through online retailers, the cover had to work as a thumbnail image. This fundamentally changed what made a cover effective. Fine detail, subtle texture, and nuanced color became less important. High contrast, bold typography, and simple compositions became more important. A cover that looked beautiful in a bookshop window might be an indistinguishable smudge at 150 pixels wide on a screen.

I think about this tension a lot at ScrollWorks, because we care about physical books. When we design a cover, we are designing for two very different contexts simultaneously. The cover needs to work as a small digital thumbnail for online retail and social media sharing. But it also needs to work as a physical object that someone picks up, holds in their hands, and feels good about owning. These requirements are sometimes in conflict. A cover optimized for thumbnail visibility might feel garish or simplistic in person. A cover that is beautiful and tactile in person might be invisible online.

Our approach is to start with the physical object and then verify that it works digitally, rather than the other way around. I have seen publishers who design for the thumbnail first and the physical book second, and the results always feel slightly hollow to me. The physical book is the real product. The thumbnail is just a photograph of it. If the real thing is not compelling, the photograph will not save it.

Now, let me talk about where I think cover design is heading, because the current moment is interesting. We are in a period where several trends are competing with each other. The dominant trend in literary fiction for the past few years has been a kind of refined minimalism: simple illustrations, limited color palettes, careful typography. Think of covers with a single object, a piece of fruit, a chair, a window, rendered in a flat or semi-flat style against a clean background. These covers are elegant and distinctive, and they photograph beautifully for social media. But they are also starting to feel formulaic, which is the inevitable fate of any design trend that gets widely adopted.

In commercial fiction, there has been a return to illustration, particularly hand-drawn or painterly styles, after years of photographic dominance. Romance covers have moved away from the classic “shirtless man” photograph toward whimsical, colorful illustrations. Thrillers have experimented with typographic covers where the title itself is the primary visual element, manipulated or distorted to create a sense of unease. Non-fiction has been through a phase of bright, solid-color covers with bold sans-serif type, which I think is now giving way to something more textured and nuanced.

The most interesting development, in my view, is the growing influence of self-publishing and indie publishing on mainstream cover design. Self-published authors, working with freelance designers on tight budgets, have been forced to be creative and responsive to reader preferences in ways that traditional publishers sometimes are not. The best indie covers are often ahead of the trend curve because indie designers are not constrained by the slow-moving processes and conservative instincts of large publishing houses. I have noticed major publishers quietly adopting visual approaches that first appeared in the indie market, sometimes with a lag of a year or two.

At ScrollWorks, we have designed covers for titles like The Last Archive and The Cartographer’s Dilemma with an eye toward what I think of as timeless clarity. I want our covers to look good in ten years, not just this season. That means avoiding the most fashion-forward trends and instead focusing on strong composition, readable typography, and colors that feel specific to the book rather than to the current aesthetic moment. Whether we succeed at this is for others to judge, but it is the intention behind every cover we produce.

Looking back at my collection of old covers, the ones I return to most often are the ones that feel like they were designed for the specific book they are attached to, rather than for the genre or the market. They have a sense of personality that transcends the design trends of their era. The best cover I own is a 1963 edition of a novel I have never actually read. The cover features a single photograph of a rain-slicked street at night, with one lit window in the distance. It tells you everything you need to know about the book’s mood without telling you anything about its plot. Sixty years later, it still works. That is what I am aiming for every time we sit down to design a new cover, and I suspect I will be chasing that standard for as long as I am in this business.