The 11 Best Book Covers of January
Fresh Covers for a Fresh Start
Another month of books, another month of book covers. The first crop of designs of 2023 is fresh, cheeky, and mushroom-forward, which can only portend good things (please let it portend good things). Here are my favorites of the month, and as always, feel free to drop your own below.
The vibrant yellow, all-caps text treatment against this intriguing black and white photograph would have been appealing even without the inset—but of course it’s the inset that makes it sing. (It also reminds me a bit of Na Kim’s cover for Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy, though Miceli’s take is subtler.)
I love an esoteric book cover with a little bit of humor.
The first of two luscious mushroom covers this month—I love the texture here, the vintage quality of the mushrooms, and most of all, the elegant use of the staff, which I can’t ever recall seeing on a book cover before.
So simple but so terrifying (and so brilliant).
The blurb on Salesses’ novel calls it “blistering, confident, full of swagger and heart” and the same could be said for this cover—it looks, besides all that, like Kulick had actual fun making it.
Another so-simple-and-yet-so-smart cover for this list, from the great Oliver Munday.
The visual equivalent of ASMR.
I’m getting Saul Bass’s Vertigo vibes, updated with a sense of humor. I love how much space the deceptively simple elements take up.
The impossible geometries here—and the way the text is tucked in among them—make me want to keep looking.
I don’t even really know what’s going on here, but I want to find out.
Which do you see first, the goat or the girl?