214: 1980s SWP Pamphlets
March 16, 2015
In November, while touring London with comrades from Interference Archive, we stopped at Bookmarks, a nice-sized bookshop run by the Socialist Workers Party (which is a sister organization to the…
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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 
213: Latin America Mass Markets
February 23, 2015
This past weekend was the big annual church book sale in my neighborhood, and I found some great books, including a mini-collection of mass market paperbacks from the 1960s about…
212: Spro-Cas
February 9, 2015
Back to Africa this week. I’ve got a massive backlog of African publishers I want to cover, but tracking down information about them is often difficult, as most no longer…
211: Little New World, part II
February 2, 2015
This week I’m going to go through the second half of Little New World Paperbacks, roughly in order of their issue number. The last number I’ve found is LNW-39, although…
210: Little New World, part I
January 26, 2015
From the early 20th century through the early 1960s, one of the largest Left organizations in the US (if not the largest) was the Communist Party USA. The propaganda…
209: Images of a Revolution
January 12, 2015
One of my favorite art books is Images of a Revolution, a oversized if slim volume on the murals of revolutionary Mozambique. It was published in 1983 by the Zimbabwe…
208: Zimbabwe Publishing House
January 5, 2015
As many of you know, I’m a big collector of African paperbacks (and ones about Africa), and I’ve been slowing featuring different presses here on the blog. Past features include:…
207: Anvil Press
December 29, 2014
Over the last couple years I’ve been finding old political mass market books about Ireland, and squirreling them away. Then I realized they’re actually all published by the same press,…
206: Benia Krik
December 15, 2014
A quick week, only one cover today. I recently found this amazing copy of Isaac Babel’s play Benia Krik. The design is attributed to “Lloyd,” the book published by Collet’s…
205: Americanist Library
December 8, 2014
This week we swing from left to far right, Africa to Belmont, Massachusetts. Sorry for the whiplash. The Americanist Library is a collection of almost twenty mass market paperbacks put…
204: Three Crowns Africa
December 1, 2014
There were three major British publishers which began putting out books by African authors in the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially to the educational book market. The big two…
203: Leonard Baskin, part II
November 24, 2014
The second half of Leonard Baskin’s book cover output I’ve found is composed of facial portraits. The portrait of Kafka to the right is exceptional. The picture feels like it…
202: Leonard Baskin, part I
November 17, 2014
In my mind, three of the most significant social realist printmakers that were working in the US in the second half of the 20th Century were Leonard Baskin, Antonio Frasconi,…
201: Ronald Clyne
November 10, 2014
Ronald Clyne is best known as the brilliant designer of most of the Folkways label record covers, over 500 from the 1950s through the early 1980s (for more on that,…
200: Two Hundred!!!
November 3, 2014
The first “Judging Books by Their Covers” post was on April 12, 2010. Four and half years and over 2,000 book covers later, I’ve reached the two hundred post mark….
199: stage 1
October 27, 2014
In honor of my upcoming trip to London, I thought I’d do a feature on a little known lefty publisher from the UK. For awhile now I’ve been running into…
198: New Century Publishers, part III
October 20, 2014
Back in 2011 I published a couple posts looking at the covers of New Century Publishers, a Communist Party-run press that published from the 1940s into the 1960s, and appears…
197: Ghana Publishing House
October 13, 2014
For the past decade I’ve slowly been collecting all kinds of paperbacks published about and within Africa. Last year at the Haunted Bookshop in Iowa City I ran across a…
196: ESP
October 6, 2014
A brief break from the longer entries, I wanted to share this amazing cover from Susy Smith’s ESP (Pyramid Books, 1962). I can mostly let it speak for itself, but…
195: Ramparts Press
September 29, 2014
I’m going to try to be a little less complete-ist than I’ve been in the past, hopefully making these posts a bit easier to compile. To that end, this is…