20 Embarrassingly Bad Book Covers for Classic Novels

This week, we spotted a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad book cover for Stephen King’s The Shining over at the Guardian. It seems especially unfair for such a modern classic to be saddled with such an ugly cover, and so we were inspired to search the Internet for the worst covers to ever sully the faces of great books, whether at home or abroad. Peek through your fingers at a selection of them after the jump, and if we missed your (least) favorite, add it to our collection in the comments.

shining

As Pxyz points out, this Brazilian cover of The Shining looks like a terrible exercise in ’80s advertising. Her earrings are shiny, though.

shelley

We agree — broadswords and alien ice mountains would have made Frankenstein much, much better. Except, wait.

farewell

Everything about this cover makes literal sense, we guess — they’re in Italy, hence the flag background, and there’s a love story, which accounts for the ghostly embrace. But put together, it all just looks like an extremely low-budget dealing-with-grief pamphlet.

pimp

We don’t think that even aristocratic secret societies had badly Photoshopped kittens and cheap briefcases during the French Revolution.

lolita

From what we can tell, this Japanese cover of Lolita portrays the title character as a lanky, wistful space alien walking the streets in the nude. That’s only slightly off.

screw

Because this is a book about screws, right?

crimen

We can only laugh.

fitz

We don’t know about you, but we think this would make more tonal sense if it were the cover of The Great Gatsby and the Mixed up Files of Nick Carraway.

dubliners

Font is everything. So is which random stock image you choose.

huck

How did we miss this scene in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? It seems like it would have been a good one.

princessbride

Who decided that this goofy, delightful meta fairy tale should be represented by a woman with snakes growing out of her, um, hips surrounded by skulls?

broccoli

Eat your Carrie. It’s good for you.

crackann

Oof. No one bothered to check whether Anne of Green Gables was a plucky redheaded farm girl, rather than an alluring blonde co-ed?

plath

There’s been much ado about this cover, but its vaguely insulting undertones aside, it’s just plain ugly.

dorothy

Wait, how did we miss the fact that Oz was a red planet with fighter jets?

gilman

This one is particularly insulting, considering that the book in question concerns an all-female, asexually reproducing society, and means to question the very standards of gender that this cover tries ham-handedly to exploit.

gaskell

You’d never guess that this was a 1853 novel about a couple of spinster sisters in England, would you?

woolf

This novel is, surprisingly, not about a trashy spy.

romeo

Aside from the fact that the costuming reminds us strongly of Wishbone, Juliet looks like she’s about to turn Romeo into a vampire so that they can be together for all of time.

alice

With all of the rich, ridiculous imagery not only native to this book but nearly omnipresent in its legacy, you go with Wicked Witch of the West-style striped tights? Snooze.

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fardinginpublic 5 pts

Dissing Wishbone? Really? Come on, it was the 90s. Everyone knows that most costuming sucked back then. Unless it was Disney related.

papalbina 6 pts

the girl in Anne of Green Gables cover looks a lot like Michelle Williams :O

mintonmedia 12 pts

 papalbina  :O indeed.  Which brings up ideas for spin-offs: Anne of Blue Valentine Gables.  Greengables Mountain. My Week With Anne.

mintonmedia 12 pts

The sadly ironic thing is that the horrid sci-fi cover for DOROTHY AND THE WIZ would be an almost appropriate poster for the prequel movie "Oz The Great and Terrible" that is currently gracing the cinema screens of America.

indigoquilter 6 pts

There's this Penguin Modern Classics edition of "The Day of the Triffids": http://cdn3.fishpond.co.nz/0002/212/761/359683/4.jpeg  OK, it is a genuine picture of a plant of some sort, and it has a bit of a sci-fi feel to it, but it's, um, alarmingly suggestive.  "The Day of the Triffids: the Safer Sex Version"?

lisaray1 6 pts

Wow. Huckleberry Finn must have had some adventures that were edited out of MY copy!

KellyLasiter 7 pts

Not a "classic' novel but certainly a well-known one. This cover for <i>Flowers in the Attic</i> came out during the chick-lit boom when everything was pink.

 

Nothing says "sunny and pink and romantic" like being raped by your brother while you're locked up in an attic for years.

 

http://images.contentreserve.com/ImageType-100/1571-1/%7B735C7824-045A-4E65-A41A-56D4A7DC2BB7%7DImg100.jpg

mintonmedia 12 pts

You gotta like the way the noble Sir Frankenstein (or is that the noble Sir Frankenstein's Monster) is  leaning against what appears to be a cowhide-covered boulder stuck right in the middle of a ski jump.  Talk about "the agony of defeat"!

sawmeister 6 pts

"The Turn of the Screw" = A rusty old wrench fighting a shiny new wrench over control of a nut? I would have liked to have been in that art dept. meeting. It fails even on the hardware level.

 

mintonmedia 12 pts

Your criticism regarding the cover of Baroness Orczy's 1903 adventure novel displays an ignorance of its storyline.  Those who've actually READ the book know that the Scarlet Pimpernel, after accomplishing masked feats of daring-do all night, spent most of those dull workday hours in his office cubicle furtively watching YouTube videos of adorable kittens doing the cutest things.

jancam 5 pts

the covers are awful, but they might entice the sort of person who would never read these classics and maybe find out they're pretty good--and maybe is the intended reason for them.

EllaSilver 7 pts

 jancam i sort of get that and tacitly accept it. But... to be completely misleading? Fighter jets in Oz? The blond bimbo Anne Shirley? The Princess Bride as told by Anne McCaffrey? 

 

Come on. 

PennieNotPenny 5 pts

 EllaSilver  jancam Yeah. There's a way to make covers interesting without being totally irrelevant.

 

That Anne of the Green Gables one is easily the most annoying to me. It's like if they made it into a porno. Ugh.

DarinJohnHocking 6 pts

 PennieNotPenny  EllaSilver  jancam You say that like it is a bad thing. :-)

 

indigoquilter 6 pts

 DarinJohnHocking  PennieNotPenny  EllaSilver  jancam Unfortunately I'm now imagining the version illustrating the "bosom friendship" between Anne and Diana...

mintonmedia 12 pts

   PennieNotPenny    Well, at least "Anne Does Green Gables" is only soft-core.

 
mintonmedia 12 pts

As you've amply pointed out, many of these are just lazy, ill-informed choices based on the books' titles...if even that. But the cover to Преступлéние и наказáние, er, Crimin y Castigo, shows real imagination.

 

A hipster Raskolnikov (love that porkpie!) about to conk an Alyona Ivanovna from a horror/sci-fi grindhouse flick with an ax only a Steven King could so perfectly weather is the perfect image to lure a Spanish-speaking youth into reading a book that will convince him that murdering the old Jew who runs the barrio's pawn shop is the perfect solution to teen angst. Way to go!

bkaps 6 pts

These are amazing!  When my friend recommended that I read Donna Tartt's The Secret History, the first copy I found looked like it was a trashy romance sold in grocery stores, making me completely skeptical of what turned out to be a wonderful novel.  If you do a Google image search, it's the cover with the rose and pillar in the foreground, and school in the background.

 

mintonmedia 12 pts

 bkaps

How could you have neglected mentioning the brilliant typographical design that seems to have renamed the book as "The #1 Bestseller Secret History"?

emilytemple 6 pts moderator

 bkaps I forgot about that cover! I actually own it, and it's my "loaner" copy of The Secret History -- because unlike the one I keep to myself, I know I won't be upset if friends lose/keep/ruin it. 

RobtheSlob 9 pts

Someone sign me up for the Great Classic Series posthaste! I'd look forward every month to a wonderful new completely inane rendering of ONLY THE TITLE OF THE BOOK. Because designers can't read.

mintonmedia 12 pts

 RobtheSlob The "Great Classic Series" is indeed a mine of amazingly wrong-headed cover art. A search on Amazon brought up, among others, a copy of Teddy Roosevelt's "Rough Riders" with knights in armor being rallied to storm a castle ( http://www.amazon.com/Rough-Riders-Classic-Theodore-Roosevelt/dp/8184569211/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363911125&sr=1-1&keywords=%22great+classic+series%22 ), John Muir's "The Yosemite" with, instead of some stock shot of Vernal Fall or Half Dome, the exact Spanish-American war scene Roosevelt's book should have had ( http://www.amazon.com/Yosemite-Great-Classic-John-Muir/dp/8132031598/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363911729&sr=1-3&keywords=%22great+classic+series%22 ) and E.M. Forster's "Howard's End" with a befuddling piece of blue-tinted mysticism featuring a dove landing on someone's palm in front of a sunflower whos seeds are (such irony) our fragile little world ( http://www.amazon.com/Howards-End-Great-Classic-Forster/dp/8132023579/ref=sr_1_13?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363910794&sr=1-13&keywords=%22great+classic+series%22 )  A feast for the imagination...if one crave junk food, that is.

 
mintonmedia 12 pts

 AgnesLabos Which is, I believe, the Serbian title of "Huckleberry Finn"?

 
mintonmedia 12 pts

 AgnesLabos OMG...just googled the phrase and, despite my snarky guess, it seems to be the translation for "Turn of The Screw" in Hungarian.  Apologies. :D

 
RebeccaWhite1 10 pts

Again, I think you should put publishers and years of publication in these slideshows.  They give us more info.

 

And I actually like the Alice in Wonderland.  It's just a little strange and irreverent and slightly naughty.

heymrsfrancis 5 pts

 RebeccaWhite1  I agree. It seems a lot of the aesthetic involved has to do with the decades these editions were issued. And some of the books are from the same publisher. I must say the Brazilian version of The Shining is very much a Brazilian soap opera style of imagery (I am from Brazil), very typical of the overly dramatic and upper class imagery of telenovelas.

ToSeek 5 pts

 RebeccaWhite1 My problem with the "Alice" cover is that she wears those stockings in "Through the Looking Glass", not "Wonderland." But then I'm a nitpicker.

mintonmedia 12 pts

 RebeccaWhite1  Personally, I think the cover would have worked better on an edition of "Lolita".

 
IreneWeiLo 5 pts

I was expecting more of the kitsch wonderfulness that was Stephen King's The Shining but the rest of the book covers just feel lazy like the covers of bargain classics hanging about chain bookstores. Not much to single out when they're all pretty bad and uninspired. 

MairaFuzaro 5 pts

The Night and Day's cover look like Gossip Girl's covers. 

MilenaTaigaAlfano 5 pts

That's not the italian flag, ours has vertical stripes :)

freshacconci 8 pts

@MilenaTaigaAlfano So, the Hungarian flag. Upside down. Even better.

slalaurette 7 pts

The "Alice" one is good. The book is heavy in metaphors of growth and awakening, which this image captures subtly. Also, itr's true that the book is chock full of "rich, ridiculous imagery", but that doesn't mean you have to put it all in the cover. It's best, in fact, to leave most of it to the imagination, or so I happen to think, and that is why I like "minimalist" covers.