The Eyes Have It: 25 Book Covers That Look Back

By Emily Temple

Jul 17, 2011

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!