On Facebook, the wonderful writer Marlon James made a quick post about the difference between American and British book covers, noting, “As my British publisher once said ‘over here darling we try to sell books.'” The best example was this:
Let’s just say that even though I have no interest in Fire Island or its history, really, the UK cover of the book sent me to Blackwell’s just to look up the price and for a moment I considered ordering it. (I didn’t buy it. I don’t need more books. I have no interest in Fire Island. But still. Or butt still….)
Most US book covers have, indeed, gotten really boring. They’ve been algorithmed and templated, made to be readable as thumbnail images on Amazon. Check out LitHub’s survey of 47 designers and the 139 results for their favorite book covers of 2023 — lots of tasteful, artful designs, but not one of them with any … well, libido. This is not to say that I think all book covers ought to make readers horny to get them home, but the LitHub survey suggests that for contemporary US book designers, the sexiest thing in the world is a well-honed typeface.
Years ago at LitHub, I myself wrote about a book cover that was immensely important to me when I was young, the cover for The Culture of Desire by Frank Browning, a book I discovered at the local college library and which nearly caused me to faint when I saw it.
That cover to this day returns to me a sense of adolescent yearning I otherwise rarely have access to.
The other cover from that era that grabbed my young queer attention was not one with hot guys on it, or any image at all, but (like so many covers today) was text only: Queer in America by Michelangelo Signorile. Also at the library. The thing that stood out for me was the neon pink color. It doesn’t reproduce well in photos, but here’s one from a used book dealer that more or less gets it:
This was early 1990s, and just the word queer in a title was arresting, provocative, powerful. That word plus fiery pink was irresistible for me, though, like The Culture of Desire, it took me a lot of courage to sign it out from the library because I was terrified of what the person working the circulation desk would think of me. I knew some of the librarians there, and I remember making sure that nobody who knew me was working when I took those books out.
Another book from that era that caught my attention was one I only saw in England during a school trip there. This one’s all about the title — the cover is, in fact, amusingly quiet in comparison to what the book’s title is:
In the US, the book was released as Martin & John. It’s a book I love, but I’ve sometimes thought of getting a copy of the UK edition just for the sake of impropriety.
When I was in college, I often found myself attracted to covers from High Risk Books, which had enough of a shared design and aesthetic to be immediately recognizable. The one that most beguiled me, and I’m sure contributed to my buying the book without knowing anything about it, was for Jack the Modernist by Robert Glück:
(Is it any surprise that for my two story collections, I put naked men on the covers? Hmmm….)
More recently, and contrary in some ways to the idea that US covers have gotten safe and boring, there’s the American cover for one of my favorite novels, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which uses Peter Hujar’s 1969 photograph “Orgasmic Man”:
(In a further contradiction of the idea that the UK has better covers than the US, the first UK hardcover and paperback editions of A Little Life did not use the Hujar photo and instead did the standard mostly-typeface cover, though a later reprint did use the Hujar photo, less closely cropped than the US.)
At the top of this post, I put a favorite cover from Alejandro Cañedo, who did astonishingly queer things to a few Astounding science fiction magazine covers in the 1940s and 1950s. The cover above is one I reference in my story “Where’s the Rest of Me?” in Blood. I also really like this one, the July 1954 issue of Astounding:
I love that the cover is titled “Inappropriate”.
Of course, this brings us to the gay and lesbian pulp novels, a topic far too large for me to delve into here, but let me share a favorite cover, just to note it:
I’ve only been showcasing fiction here, but there are some wonderfully queer (and sometimes libidinal) covers for nonfiction books. Here’s a favorite book with also a favorite cover, Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling:
Or consider Lesbian Rule by Amy Villarejo:
Or Essex Hemphill’s classic Ceremonies (which I think uses a still from the film Tongues Untied, which Hemphill was involved with):
In 1992, when that book was released by Plume, that cover was radically transgressing mainstream society’s prejudices about both queers and people of color. Some of its force may have been smoothed away by the growing sense of tolerance across the years, but it’s still imagery we need, and need more of, because queer and trans people of color are among the most targeted, caricatured, oppressed, and brutalized of our people. Images of companionship, intimacy, and love among the minoritized and oppressed are images that do vital work in the world.
I will end this little Pride Month cover tease with a reissue of a book in a new edition, now with a cover illustrated by an old painting that is still powerfully queer and attention-getting, the McNally Editions reissue of Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples with a Duncan Grant painting on the cover:
I have an old edition of this book, but have considered picking up the new one just for the audacious beauty of the cover. Duncan Grant is a favorite of mine, one of the key members of the Bloomsbury Group, and I just love the way the tenderness and intimacy of the picture here is wrapped in a high class book design, the austerity of the type and title design complemented by the painting’s muted colors but shattered by its depiction of raw, naked pleasure.
Here’s to book covers that do the queer work our broken world so desperately needs.
