Flavorwire

Ever wonder what your favorite book looked like when it was first published? While many classics — The Great Gatsby, Catch-22 — have retained their iconic, original covers over the years, others have changed with the times. As a follow up to last week’s roundup of famous magazines’ first covers, we’ve compiled 20 beautiful, surprising, or otherwise notable first covers of classic novels that we’d never seen before. See a surprisingly minimalist The Age of Innocence, a painful-looking The Sound and the Fury, the design that preceded A Clockwork Orange‘s famous ’70s cover, and many more, in chronological order after the jump.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865