Here are a series of book covers, different ones for the same book. Actually, I am attracted to most of them, though the commentator disagrees. It is interesting to see the different interpretations of some standard novel titles. Which ones do you find positive and which negative?

 William Faulkner

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Ugly Covers for Great Books

by Gabe Habash

Scribner just released this gorgeous new edition of A Farewell to Arms, complete with all of Hemingway’s alternate endings. If you ask most people with eyes, they’ll tell you the cover is a significant upgrade from the other two most common editions (here and here). So–what other books need saving from their old jackets? Here are six great books with spotty cover histories and solutions for those…ahem…aesthetically challenged titles.

Click any of the jackets below for higher-res.

1. Evelyn Waugh

These unappealing cartoon drawings could be trying to convey the prodding and farcical elements of Waugh’s novels, illustrated representations of Waugh’s playful personality, which, as Nancy Mitford stated, was as follows: “What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything.”

But I’m not buying it. The style (which was also used, among others, forScoop and Vile Bodies) don’t make me want to read any of them–the fonts are all over the place and nothing about the color or composition is particularly pleasing. It’s also curious that the green-shirted, tweed-suited figure seems to appear on both the Brideshead cover and the Handful of Dust cover.

Though I’m not wild about the Dust cover, let’s take these two instead:

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