I’ve talked about it before, but the idea that you can’t judge a book by its cover is wrong. Very wrong. You should be judging books by their covers. I also think you should be judging them by their spines, too, but that’s another blog. The design of a book is purposeful and artistic, chosen to target the right audience at the right time. Haruki Murakami is one of the most popular writers of the last 20 years, and he’s a great writer, but Chip Kidd’s incredible designs helped push a quirky, mostly unknown writer into the rare space of an author who actually makes money. And even if money has nothing to do with it, Kidd brings more readers to Murakami’s works because he condenses what’s inside into visually stunning cover art.
In the new book, Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig, by Steve Heller we get a great look at the greatest book designer of all time. In 1941 a young designer named Alvin Lustig started doing cover art for a small, independent press named New Directions. Lustig broke from the traditions of the day by not giving you a look into the plot of the book, but a look into the feel of the book. These feelings were expressed in the same sharp, clean, nonrepresentational lines that the authors of the experimental Modern novels of the mid-century were playing with. These designs are impeccable. Every line, just like Joyce’s Ulysses, is agonized over, and important. Lustig’s work for Henry Miller, Djuana Barnes, and Tennessee Williams are perfect. The Austrian Architect Adolf Loos’s famous essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ teaches us that, “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects”, and Lustig’s designs concur.
This is at the top of my wish list for this holiday season. It’s a great gift.
–Brian Contine
BookPeople 
You can definitely judge a book by it’s cover. The exception being the work of Curtis Sittenfeld. It’s actually quite good, but looks like tween fiction.
I think you can judge the cover by its cover; but I can’t see how you can infer the art of the written word from the art of the picture. If it’s a good cover and a good book…I quickly forget anything about the cover in my happy remembrance of the book.
I think even the lowly blurb is more informative than the front cover image. Pictures tell a thousand words, which tells a very diluted little about upwards of sixty thousand.
I think pictures and words aren’t a marriage made in heaven; I think they’re well nigh divorced and were always going to be.
A book and its cover is a match made in Emma, not heaven! 😛