The 50 Best Slaughterhouse-Five Covers from Around the World

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, turns 50 this week. Originally published on March 31, 1969, the novel—a genre-bending WWII story about a soldier who becomes “unstuck in time”—was Vonnegut’s first to become a bestseller, and 50 years later, it’s still his most beloved and influential. Many a teenage mind has been blown by Slaughterhouse-Five, and many an adult mind, too. To celebrate the birthday of this essential American novel, I looked at how it’s been covered over the years—both at home and abroad. Some of the below covers are beautiful, some impactful, and some simply odd, but they all make me want to read the book again.

First Edition cover, Delacorte, 1969

Mondadori (Italian), 1969

Gyldendal (Danish), 1969

Meulenhoff (Dutch), 1970

Hoffmann und Campe (German), 1970

Dell first edition paperback, 1971

Kirjastus Eesti Raamat (Estonian), 1971

Mladá fronta (Czech), 1973

BIGZ (Serbian), 1973

J’ai Lu (French), 1973

Dell paperback, 1976

Editorial Bruguera (Spanish), 1977

早川書房 (Japanese), 1978

Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó (Hungarian), 1980

Vintage, 1982

Military Publishers (Bulgaria), 1982

Mondadori (Italian), 1988

Polish edition, 1990

Dell paperback, 1991

Vintage 1991

Swedish edition, 1996

Vintage UK, 2000

Maecenas Könyvkiadó (Hungarian), 2001

Anagrama (Spanish), 2006

Kitos knygos (Lithuanian), 2006

Argo (Czech), 2008

Folio Society, ill. John Holder, 2008

АСТ Москва (Russian), 2009

Bertrand Editora (Portugese), 2011

Tammi (Finnish), 2012

Norstedts (Swedish), 2013

AST (Russian), 2014

Feltrinelli (Italian), 2014

Видавництво Старого Лева (Ukranian), 2014

ART (Romanian), 2014

Helikon (Hungarian), 2014

April Yayıncılık (Turkish), 2015

დიოგენე (Georgian), 2015

Penguin Australia Vintage Classics edition, 2016

麥田出版社 (Chinese), 2016

Slovart (Slovak), 2016

HoCa – Belletristik (German), 2016

Points (French), 2016

Argo (Czech), 2016

Gyldendal (Danish), 2016

ART (Romanian), 2017

Knygos (Lithuanian), 2017

Zysk i S-ka (Polish), 2018

Penguin UK Vintage Classics, 50th Anniversary Edition, 2019

Intrínseca (Portuguese), 2019