A Brief History of Book Covers

Discover how book covers evolved over the centuries with Silja Götz

In the beginning, books were leather-bound, made to fit someone's library. Only in the 19th century, images started to appear on covers to give us an idea of a book’s content.

Silja Götz (@Silja) is a German illustrator who has worked with press clients like The New Yorker, Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Die Zeit, Outdoor magazine, and more. Her book cover illustrations adorn the books of publishers like Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Gräfe und Unzer, and Doubleday. In her Domestika course, she reveals the secrets of conceptual illustration to create eye-catching book covers and tells us how book covers evolved over the last century.

Beginnings

The book cover as a way of advertising the book’s content did not exist until the late 19th century. Until then, book bindings—made in leather or vellum—were merely handcrafted protection for expensively printed or hand-written pages. In the 1820s, with the introduction of steam-powered presses, books became cheaper to make, and it made sense also to produce covers cheaply, using mechanical binding.

Early design influences

The ability to print made it possible to use multicolor lithography and halftone illustration techniques to design book covers. At first, a significant influence came from the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements, with techniques borrowed from the nineteenth-century poster-artists. Graphic design as a professional practice started to develop and take hold in the book industry.

Early book cover designers

The cover design by Aubrey Beardsley for the magazine The Yellow Book is considered today as the first example of commercial and striking cover art and was a major influence in book design in the early 20th century.
The Russian avant-garde also did a lot to advance the cover design’s art, with artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky providing radically modern book cover designs.

Penguin

The real boost in cover design came in 1935 when Penguin invented the paperback, making affordable books available for a mass market. The book cover became a vital commercial tool with more extensive distribution and competition, with advertising and communication functions.

Post-war era

As the book industry becomes more and more competitive, covers needed to fit the book’s content and style into a genre, and the designs needed to stand out and push boundaries to attract sales. With international distribution, they also need to be adapted to the country in which they are sold.

Digital era

Internet book sales are still affected by cover design, making books identifiable as they are promoted online.

Silja explains: ‘Book covers want to sell you a product, however highbrow, and for this purpose, they have to fit into a genre and stand out at the same time. It's a kind of packaging, a claim for your attention and a promise.’

If you want to know more about the art of book cover design, sign up for Silja Götz’s course Book Cover Illustration: Unraveling the Essence of a Story, and create a striking book cover full of meaning for a fiction novel of your choice.

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