Sometimes, it’s OK to judge a book by its cover

Graphic designer Milton Glaser may have become famous for his “I Love New York” logo and his poster for Bob Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” LP, which helped launch the psychedelic art movement. But he  also designed many notable book jackets, including Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” which chronicled author Ken Kesey’s legendary countercultural bus trip across the country.

Apart from the most famous book jacket designers, like Glaser, Chip Kidd and George Salter, most fall into anonymity. Many aren’t even listed on the jackets themselves.

Book jackets were originally designed to protect books. Eventually, it was discovered that illustrative jackets helped sell books by enticing readers to pull them off the shelf and look at them.

The evolution may be best represented by the often-tawdry pulp paperback covers of the 1950s, exemplified by the illustrations donning John D. MacDonald’s novels.

For collectors of first editions, a pristine dust jacket can propel the price of a book to astronomical figures.

Classics like “The Great Gatsby,” with its glaring green eyes, “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Maltese Falcon” are typically worth mere thousands without a dust jacket. With a jacket, a first edition of “Gatsby” can sell for anywhere from $12,000 to $70,000. Two bookseller friends of mine, one with a first-edition copy and the other a first-edition dust jacket, paired up to sell “Mockingbird” for a premium.

Other notable dust jackets include those of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces,” executed by Ed Lindlof; Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man,” by Wendell Minor; and Myra Friedman’s “Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin,” by Robert Cato, known mostly for his album cover designs.

Michigan State University graduate Jim Harrison took a different approach with nearly all his books, using oil paintings of Western scenery by his good friend, landscape artist Russell Chatham.

Generally speaking, book jackets have followed popular art movements like modernism, cubism and surrealism. Salvador Dalí, for example, was tapped to illustrate a 1969 reprint of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” More modern artists like Keith Haring, Banksy and Andy Warhol have also found their art on book jackets.

Today, more and more jackets look like they were designed by artificial intelligence, featuring large blocks of bright color and android-like humans. With apologies to the artist, the recent New York Times best-selling romance novel “Funny Story” falls into that category.

Many book jackets have later been superseded by movie poster art, like Saul Bass’ outline of a disassembled body for “Anatomy of a Murder,” which became the default jacket for later editions of Robert Traver’s true-crime book.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, a popular technique for dust jacket art was to use still photography from popular movies. These books were called photoplay editions and hoped to take advantage of the popularity of silver-screen adaptations of books by authors like Agatha Christie.

Two other notable book jackets and their pedigrees are worth mentioning. The first, Penelope Ashe’s “Naked Came the Stranger,” shows a nude woman from behind and caused quite a stir when it was first published in 1969.

In the era of potboilers written by authors like Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins, “Naked Came the Stranger,” about a housewife serial killer, entered that market with a bang. It was later discovered that the book was written by a couple of dozen New York journalists to satirize the literary culture of the time. There was no Penelope Ashe, and the purported photo of her on the back of the dustjacket was a relative of one of the writers.

Nevertheless, fueled by the literary hoax, the book sold 90,000 copies by October 1969 and spent 13 weeks on The New York Times’ best-sellers list by the end of the year. The jacket illustrator is listed as Nick Frank, also likely a made-up name.

In 1977, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” a choreopoem by playwright and poet Ntozake Shange, struck a chord with readers nationwide. A promotional poster by Paul Davis, a legendary artist who was noted for his iconic posters of political figures like Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, was eventually adopted as the work’s cover. Davis also illustrated the cover of a 1966 Ramparts magazine showing former South Vietnamese First Lady Madame Nhu in a Michigan State University cheerleading outfit. The article revealed MSU’s notorious role in the Vietnam War.

The next time you visit a bookstore, pay attention to book jackets and see which ones grab your attention. You might be in for a surprise.