Outside of a having a big name author, a top spot on the New York Times Best Sellers List, or Oprah's gushing endorsement, a book needs an edge if it’s going to sell. A book’s design, therefore, suddenly becomes a big differentiator. Think about it. How many times have you picked up a book knowing exactly zip about it? If you hadn't heard of the author, and the title wasn't something like Learn The Meaning of Life Before Lunchtime, then the chances are good that the book design was speaking to you. Something about the design made it stand out among a sea of competing titles, made you pick it up, read the solicited blurbs, scan the jacket copy, and perhaps even aided in the decision to lay down a few ducats and bring it home.

A confessed dust jacket junkie, I’ve long thought that book design is one of the most overlooked and under-appreciated disciplines in the field. The best book designs use cleverly executed imagery and masterful typography to coax out the essence of the story within while giving nothing away. Unique jacket materials, die cut or adorned with the odd sculpted emboss or foil stamp, and rustic, deckled pages serve to lend even the most humble book both an aesthetic and tactile appeal, elevating it to something you like to look at, to hold, or to prominently display in your home. The worst can look sensationally cheap, and feature garish, hurried renderings that—as was the case with an unfortunate novelist professor of mine—inadvertently reveal the story's ending.

Feeling as I do about book design, I was thrilled to find that The Book Cover Archive has put together a web collection of some of the most compelling book designs in recent memory. From the haunting photos and rough-hewn type of Mother's Kafka library, to the ingenious paper-craft of Sanda Zahirovic employed on a number of science fiction classics (examples below), you can't help but get drawn in by the many colorful, kitschy, and canny designs on display. And who knows? Maybe you’ll even discover a good read along the way.

—Tom