Looking at a beautifully designed book cover is one thing, but if you only get the front, you aren’t getting the whole story. Older book covers served as windows into what people used to read, thanks to the catalog selections a lot of publishers put on the backs of their books, as well as showing even more beautiful art on the back. And that’s why going through a site like Facsimile Dust Jackets is such a treat; the site has pages full of covers you can buy to put on your beat up old books, or simply frame as art.
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Harper & Brothers, (1933)
Bram Stoker, Dracula, Doubleday Page & Co. & Country Life Press (1927 reprint)
P.G. Wodehouse, Something New, A. L. Burt Company (1915)
James Joyce, Ulysses, John Lane/The Bodley Head (1936)
John Fante, Ask the Dust, Stackpole Sons (1939)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1922)
Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus, Houghton Mifflin Company (1959)
John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat, Grosset & Dunlap (1943 reprint)
Edith Wharton, The Reef, Syndicate Publishing Company (1912)
Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?, Random House (1941)
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep, Robert O. Ballou Publisher (1934)
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Alfred A. Knopf (1953)
Graham Greene, England Made Me, Doubleday Doran (1935)
Frank Graham, The Brooklyn Dodgers: An Informal History, G. P. Putnam’s Sons (1945)
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Modern Library reprint
Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary , The Bodley Head (1922)
Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool, Charles Scribner’s Sons, (1936)
Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, Jonathan Cape (1932)
Paul Bowles, Let it Come Down, Random House (1952)
Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Boni & Liveright (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night, Chatto and Windus (1934)
Raymond Chandler, The Lady in The Lake, Alfred A. Knopf (1943)
Franz Kafka, Amerika, New Directions (1940)
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, Rinehart & Company, Inc. (1948)
P.G. Wodehouse, The Pot-Hunters, A. & C. Black, Ltd. (1902)
Vladimir Nabokov (spelled “Nabokoff”), Laughter in the Dark, The Bobbs-Merrill Company (1938)
Willa Cather, My Antonia, Houghton Mifflin Company (1941 reprint)
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, Harper & Row (1967)
Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, The Viking Press (1948 reprint)
William Faulkner, Mosquitoes, Boni & Liveright (1933 new second printing)
Agatha Christie, Parker Pyne Investigates, Collins Mystery (1934)
Oscar Hammerstein, Lyrics, Simon & Schuster (1949)
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, Doubleday (1954)
Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, Harcourt, Brace and Company (1954)
Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc. (1943)
Arthur Miller, The Misfits, The Viking Press (1961)
William Faulkner, Pylon, Harrison Smith & Robert Haas (1935)
Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, Chapman & Hall, Ltd. (1928)
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, John Lehmann Ltd. (1949)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Vegetable, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1923)
Ian Flemming, Casino Royale, Jonathan Cape (1964 reprint)
S.J. Perelman, The Dream Department, Random House (1943)
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, Jonathan Cape (1952)
John Updike, Couples, Alfred A. Knopf (1968)
Don DeLillo, End Zone, Houghton Mifflin Company (1972)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, The Hogarth Press (1925)
Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, The Hogarth Press (1939)
Joyce Carol Oates, By the North Grave, The Vanguard Press (1963)
Joseph Conrad, Suspense, J. M. Dent & Sons Ldt. (1925)
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend, Walker and Company, (1970)
Nathanael West, Miss Lonleyhearts, Liveright Inc. (1933)
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1929)
Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, Neville Spearman Limited (1955)
Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust, Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. (1934)
Frank Lloyd Wright and Baker Brownwell, Architecture and Modern Life, Harper & Brothers (1937)
Ian Flemming, Chitty Chittty Bang Bang, Jonathan Cape, (1965)
Joan Didion, Play it as it Lays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1970)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1925)
Frederick Kohner, Gidget, G. P. Putnam’s Sons (1957)
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day, The Viking Press (1956)
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Viking Press (1973)
Henry Miller, Remember to Remember, New Directions (1947)
Mae West, Diamond Lil, Macaulay (1932)
Truman Capote, Other Voices Other Rooms, Random House (1948)
John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra, Harcourt, Brace and Company (1934)
Anais Nin, A Spy in the House of Love, British Book Centre (1954)
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Grove Press, Inc., (1965)
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm, Doubleday (1949)
Albert Camus, The Plague, Hamish Hamilton (1948)
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. (1963)
Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark, Random House (1968)
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1968)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Grosset & Dunlap (1926 Warner Brothers movie edition)
William Faulkner, The Mansion, Random House (1959)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Chatto and Windus (1932)