that I excluded children’s books for this list, even The Hobbit and The Little Prince, iconic though they are! (The rules are slightly different for children’s books, in my opinion, so that’s an adventure for another time.) It also feels a little premature to count anything published in the last 30 years as “iconic,” so you won’t see more recent-but-recognizable covers like Conversations With Friends or A Little Life here either. Conversely, there have been hundreds of beautiful or clever or well-designed covers published over the years, but very few have actually made it to cultural icon status. There are plenty of terrible covers for Lolita and also some good ones, but this isn’t quite enough either. The iconic image that you’re thinking of-heart-shaped sunglasses, etc.-is of course from Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, and while it has been used in various ways on multiple Lolita reprints since, that’s not quite the same thing. For instance, I would argue that, famous as the book may be, there is no iconic cover of Lolita. There is some relationship, of course, between a book’s inherent popularity and endurance (we might call this its “classic” status) and the recognizability of its cover, particularly its first cover, if it was done right, and there can also be a relationship between the quality of design itself and its iconic-ness, but neither of these things are necessarily predictive.

(That’s an admittedly hazy threshold, but what isn’t these days?) That is: the most iconic book covers exist as cultural artifacts that are attached to, but slightly separate from, the books they were designed for.

But in order to compile this list, I looked for recognizability, ubiquity, and reproduction-that is, if there are a million Etsy stores selling t-shirts/buttons/posters/tote bags with the book cover, or if someone you know has ever dressed up as it for Halloween, or has a tattoo of it, it probably counts as iconic. What makes a book cover iconic? There are no hard and fast rules, of course-like anything else, you know it when you see it.

American psycho book cover