Sometimes we do judge a book by its cover
All book covers are a form of marketing; they are designed to appeal to people browsing the shelves at their local bookstores, or scrolling through a list of upcoming titles.
But not all history book covers are created equal. Some delight you with their cleverness; others impress you with their design and typography. There is not one book cover that appeals to all readers, although some come close.
Below are our picks for some of the most outstanding history nonfiction covers in recent memory.
Which nonfiction book cover would you nominate to join this list?
James M. Tabor, Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age
I love the shades of blue in this cover, and the way the electric cables emerge from the depths like a giant squid’s bioluminescent tentacles. The primary title font is also delightful; it looks like it is actually moving and refracting under the water. Genius. —MKN
Robert Suits, The Hobo: A History of America’s First Climate Migrants
I’m a sucker for bold colors and crisp graphics on history covers. The palette for this one is especially smart, evoking the dusty Plains and the colors of the 1930s. I also like the choice to use a stylized cutout rather than a full historic photo—it evokes the past while letting the cover stand out on a nonfiction shelf. —KBC
Deborah Lutz, This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life
Let’s face it. Most biographies have very boring covers. This one, though—hoo boy. The image is vivid and yet evokes the past with its “cracked paint” elements. The stars connect the graphic design to the primary title. This one definitely jumps off the shelf and right into your hands. —MKN
Carrie Gibson, The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas
The color combination of red and yellow grabs the eye first, but I really like the way the nineteenth-century illustration emerges into the more modern font of the primary title. It’s hard to design a history cover that evokes the past but doesn’t seem fusty or old-fashioned. The designers hit this one out of the park. —MKN
David Singerman, Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar
Like Megan’s love of The Cigarette cover, below, I was instantly taken with this pitch-perfect riff on a classic sugar bag design. The crinkles are the clincher! I hope every bookstore lines this one up on the shelf, face out, so you can feel like you’re in the baking aisle. —KBC
Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age
Renaissance history books are prone to a predictable cover aesthetic—lots of frescoes, lots of serif fonts. But this one, with its tangerine cover and high contrast image of a statue, pops. That sword stabbing through the title, like it’s spearing one of the myths in the subtitle, is a great finishing touch. —KBC
Moudhy Al-Rashid, Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and The Birth of History
I love a cover with movement and a more organic design, and the abstract rivers here perfectly carry the title and invite the reader on a journey. Plus, it shimmers! —KBC
Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
Many history books use paintings on their covers, and many are forgettable. But the right combination of book and art is pure magic. Taha Clayton’s “Soldier of Love” painting on We Refuse stops me in my tracks every time, and the pairing of simple, bold text with this arresting image is flawless. —KBC
Thomas Fleischman, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall
Like I said, I love bold colors and clean graphics, and this is one of my absolute favorites. The pairing of the yellow and red with that stack of black-and-white porcine splendor is a delight. —KBC
Sarah Milov, The Cigarette: A Political History
I mean, come on. This is my vote for the Best History Book Cover in Any Field, Ever. It looks so realistic I want to crack the book open like a cigarette packet. I think I may have laughed in delight when I first saw it (even though cigarettes are no laughing matter, kids!). And I still do. —MKN
Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
Another photograph for a cover, and one that represents the kinetic nature of the sea—and the Bering Strait as a place that is always shifting between solid and liquid states. Whales are key figures in the book, so it is vital that they appear on the cover, fixed in place but also somehow moving away. So, so good. —MKN
Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek
This cover is a classic. It also has that ideal interplay of past and present, with the black-and-white photograph of the land around Sand Creek in southern Colorado. Along with a very clean mix of black-and-white font, it suggests that the book will exemplify that often-quoted truism of William Faulkner’s, that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” —MKN
Podcast Episode 114: Catherine Grace Katz
Catherine Grace Katz joins the Drafting the Past podcast to talk about her newest book, Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War. Catherine is a writer, historian, and lawyer, with degrees in history from Harvard and Cambridge along with a JD from Harvard. Her first book was Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War. She talked about what goes into writing such extraordinary true stories, from how she works without an outline to the writing tool she found in her mom’s basement, and the unlikely inspiration for the book in a classic holiday movie. Click below to listen on the website, or find it in your favorite podcast player.