It’s summer, which means we’re doing more than our usual amount of bookstore browsing in the many air-conditioned shops in the greater New York area. Of course, half the fun of browsing is coming across books you’ve never heard of and picking them up, usually solely based on the covers, and for some reason we’ve noticed that we’ve been picking up a lot of big blue eyes recently. If eyes are the windows to the soul, as many people with eye tattoos have told us, does that mean we can see a book’s soul through them too? Or is that our own soul being reflected back to us? Maybe neither, but at the very least, we find book covers with eyes rather, okay, eye-catching, which is in many ways the goal of a well-designed jacket. So click through to see 25 well-designed book covers, new and old, that draw us in with their stares, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!
Designed by Stefan Sagmeister
Designed by Jamie Keenan
Designed by Jonathan Sainsbury
Designed by Peter Mendelsund
Designed by Peter Mendelsund
Designed by Gregg Kulick and Paul Buckley
Designed by Isaac Tobin
Designed by Peter Mendelsund (and let’s not forget the others in this series)
Designed by Van Oosten
Designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith
Designed by Lynn Buckley
Designed by Peter Mendelsund
Designed by Evan Gaffney
Designed by David Pelham
Designed by John Gall
Designed by Chris Ware
Designed by Shepard Fairey
Designed by High Design NYC
Designed by John Gall
Designed by Peter Mendelsund
Designed by Lloyd Ziff Design Group
Designed by Jennifer Carrow
Designed by Gregg Kulick and Paul Buckley
Designed by Paul Buckley
Designed by John Gall