I found a really nice 1917 Grosset & Dunlap hardback at Book Thug Nation about a month ago, cover below in the center. The design is based on the 1908 design of the first edition published by MacMillan, cover below to the left. I actually like this later version much better, the cream cloth provides a much better background for the illustration than the dark blue. A 1937 Grosset & Dunlap reprint reproduces the graphic again, this time on a dust jacket (I don’t believe either the 1908 or 1917 editions originally had jackets). The design on all these editions is cool, but curious. I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at: Is the shape that contains the illustration supposed to be some sort of representation of a heel? Of iron? It’s a bit lost on my pair of 21st century eyes. And I’m assuming the glowing sun is supposed to represent hope, somewhat out of reach, but it’s hard to not see it at this point as a reference to Japan, giving the cover a real World War II feel, which was obviously not something that could have been pre-imagined. It’s striking, but doesn’t at all feel like American design or representation, it almost seems more British.
 

 
Below is another set of early editions. In 1913, Regents publishes the edition to the below left, with its nice William Morris-esque floral pattern in sharp contrast to the brutality of the title. The British edition in the middle rectifies that, going for the much more direct representation of a skull super-imposed on a city on fire! And then in 1948, the dust jacket of the Grayson Publishing edition starts the visual trend that dominates the representation of the book from here on out. At first it looks like the title is simply floating in an odd-shaped black field, but then the eye adjusts, and sees the heel of a shoe. This visual trick is fun, and the terror of being stomped on is a slow burn, rather than being hit over the head with it. The same can’t be said with much of the follow-up cover imagery, as we’ve seen above with the Lawrence Hill and Bantam editions, and well see again below.
 

 
Likely the first paperback edition was by Penguin (of course), released in 1944 in a then-standard orange cover for fiction, and quickly reprinted in 1945. And then I can’t find any evidence of another Penguin edition until the title is re-released as part of the Penguin Classics series in 2006. In 2001, UK publishing upstarts Rebel, Inc. put out their own edition, with a cover once again leaning heavily on a literal representation of the title. It works OK here, the boot is a little blurry and the black circle design on top is strong enough to set the design within the broader series of the Rebel, Inc. catalog, allowing the laziness of the image selection to be a forgiven.
 

 
Dozens of foreign language editions have also been released, I found covers for a small handful below. They all have pretty traditional and conservative “continental” design save the 1910 Finnish edition published in the U.S., with its red sun rays withering down from the top left corner.
 

 
And finely, the somewhat sad but increasing reality of how many of us interact with old and public domain books, through the flood of print-on-demand editions. These are often strange amalgamations of half-hearted design attempts mixed with clip art and stock imagery, but the sometimes startlingly weird results that combination produces are entirely absent here. The cover on the left is exactly what you would expect if you asked someone who knew little of the book to design a cover, an very literal heel of a boot coming down on the viewer. The edition next to it is standard POD nonsense, stock patterns with text imposed on top, and then on the far right is the current Dover Books edition. While technically not POD, Dover has fallen far from their peek of really interesting and creative cover work in the early 1960s (see HERE, HERE, and HERE), to what I can only imagine is contract work for one or to designers to re-do the covers of their catalog of thousands of books as quickly and efficiently as possible. So there’s rarely anything interesting or surprising, just photoshop-ed titles and stock imagery.
 

 
Geez, I have to start planning out these posts better so that I can end on a bang rather than a whimper. The Iron Heel is a powerful book, and I suppose it’s sad that even as it increases in resonance, it seems doomed to a future of crappy POD and eBook editions. This is why I really respect what Rebel, Inc. was trying to do fifteen years ago, to curate a collection of important and relevant titles that have fallen out of favor and to bring them back in solid, well-edited, and nicely designed editions that can hopefully bring them a new life. But this seems easier said than done, as so many attempts at this have briefly flurished, only to have their output quickly disappear into the sea of popular publishing. This is what PM Press has been trying to do with much of the output of the venerable U.S. left publisher Charles H. Kerr. It has been a blast designing the covers for this new series of old titles (you can see most of them, and the covers I designed, HERE), but I fear sales will slow-down and finally curtail the ability to keep it going. But we shall see, there is always room for pleasant surprises!
 
Next week will be something completely different, but I do have posts in the works about other important early utopian/distopian novels by Bellamy, Huxley, and Capek, so keep a look-out for that in the near future.
 
Partial bibliography: