Writing a book is no small accomplishment. After countless “final final” drafts, edits, and rewrites, finally holding your manuscript—printed, bound, covered—has to feel pretty much fantastic. The work is done. Now it’s up to the reader to pick it off the shelf or stop their scroll and hit “add to cart.” That’s where words take a back seat to images. Before anyone reads the first sentence you no doubt pored over, they see the cover—and that first impression can make or break everything that came before it.
A well-designed cover might draw someone in and earn a long-term place on a bookshelf or coffee table. A terrible one? Well, it turns out there’s a place for those too. Reddit’s r/TerribleBookCovers is dedicated to sharing some of the weirdest, funniest, and most atrocious examples out there. We’ve stacked a few of our best (worst?) ones for you to check out below.
Of course, not every cover manages to strike that delicate balance. In fact, some seem to miss the mark rather spectacularly. Whether the result of poor taste, sloppy design, or creative ambition gone rogue, “Sometimes books have covers that are just bad,” as the subreddit r/TerribleBookCovers puts it.
And its members have certainly found plenty of examples to prove the point—one baffling, questionable, or downright inexplicable cover at a time.
So yeah, maybe in real life we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But feel free to judge these.
#24 Ulysses By James Joyce. A Cover That Is As Hard To Look At As The Book Is Hard To Read
Report
8points
#27 A J Ayer - The Central Questions Of Philosophy [doggo Was Removed From Newer Edition's Cover]
Report
8points
#29 Quite Possibly The Worst Cover The Could Have Picked. Meditations By Marcus Aurelius
Report
7points
