54: Victor Serge, part I
April 18, 2011
So I’ve got all these Cienfuegos Press and B. Traven covers to follow-up on last year’s posts, but I haven’t had the time to pull them all together. Instead, for…
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Judging Books by Their Covers
Judging Books by Their Covers is Josh MacPhee's ongoing series of writings and image collections of book covers. Although sometimes they feel marginal today, books have been a primary form of information and cultural exchange for almost 400 years. Book covers are often a person's first contact with the ideas inside, and in the hustle and bustle of contemporary life, cover designs are even more likely to shape the opinions of those that pick them up since many of us are too busy to ever read the entirety of the books. Judging Books by Their Covers largely focuses on—but is not exclusive to—the book covers and design coming out of the Left.
Josh is always looking for more book covers to feature. If you've got some gems he missed, or have ideas, drop him an email at josh (at) justseeds.org 
53: New World Paperbacks, part III
April 11, 2011
Following up on last weeks post, and some of last years covers that slipped through the cracks, here is a cool selection of New World Paperbacks (NWP) covers. The original…
52: Prisons, part VIII (George Jackson)
April 4, 2011
Well, I have to say, I’m pretty excited that I’ve now done a full year’s worth of “Judging Books by Their Covers” blog posts! Week 52! In what has otherwise…
51: Arbeiter Ring’s Semaphore series
March 28, 2011
After filling the last three months with two different five-week series (prisons and Kropotkin), I’m ready to jump into something completely different. For the most part over the past year…
50: Kropotkin, part V
March 21, 2011
Here’s the final installment of the Peter Kropotkin book cover series, 19 covers this week, 69 total over the five week series. Although what initially drew me to doing these…
49: Kropotkin, part IV
March 14, 2011
Over the next couple weeks I’m going to dig through the rest of the Peter Kropotkin covers I’ve found. Most are beardless, and many are banal at best, but there…
48: Kropotkin, part III
March 7, 2011
No more beards, but this week I’ve found cool old-school Kropotkin covers, 19th Century to early 20th. The one above is a great Czech modernist cover for Anarchist Morality, designed…
47: Kropotkin, part II
February 28, 2011
Here is the next batch of Kropotkin beard covers. Like I mentioned last week, most covers of books by classic anarchist protagonists seem to focus on portraits, but since most…
46: Kropotkin, part I
February 21, 2011
Given the last 2 months of book covers relating to prisons, I thought it would be nice to take a little break and go off on some tangents. To start,…
45: Prisons, part VII (Mumia)
February 14, 2011
So moving on, this is the final entry of the posts covering the covers of prison books. I’ve missed a lot along the way, and maybe I’ll do a follow-up…
44: Prisons, part VI (George Jackson)
February 7, 2011
In many ways the quintessential political prisoner of the 60s was George Jackson. At age 18 he was caught robbing a gas station, and sentenced to an indeterminate period of…
43: Prisons, part V
January 31, 2011
Now I’m going to move into the next sub-collection of prison book covers, books about political prisoners in the U.S. Officially the U.S. does not acknowledge that it holds political…
42: Prisons part IV
January 24, 2011
About 3 or 4 years after I first got involved in the then-tiny prison activist movement, the movement began quickly growing on college campuses, and a new round of activist,…
41: Prisons, part III
January 17, 2011
The real game changing book for prison studies was Michael Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Interestingly, the covers of the book in English, from the first hardback to the current paperback,…
40: Prisons, part II
January 10, 2011
I first became sensitized to the problems within the U.S. prison system in the early 1990s. A friend brought me to an event in Washington, DC about the political prisoner…
39: Prisons, part I
January 3, 2011
For the next month of so I’m going to focus on the covers of books about U.S. prisons. Something uplifting for the new year! I first became involved in prison-related…
38: Medu Art Ensemble Newsletter
December 27, 2010
In 1978, just across the border from South Africa in Gabarone, a group of exiled South Africans formed the Medu Art Ensemble. Medu became an armed cultural wing of the…
37: Homage to Catalonia, part II
December 20, 2010
Orwell was lucky to be published in the UK by Penguin, one of the publishers with the best record of concern for, and investment, in their book covers. The cover…
36: Homage to Catalonia, part I
December 13, 2010
The book to the left is the copy of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia that I grew up with (I think I first read it early on in high school)….
35: John Heartfield, part VI
December 6, 2010
For the final John Heartfield cover installment, I’ve collected a smattering of covers he’s done for a bunch of different publishers. Like I said at the beginning, I think his…