Cover Love: Harper’s Classic Short Story Collections

Regular visitors of RobAroundBooks (and subscribers to the feed), know that I often speak about Harper Perennial’s short story website Fifty-Two Stories, and the great short stories that they generously offer up for free every week. I always visit the site at least once a week to catch up on the latest story offering, and staring me in the face every time are images of the “soon to be released” short story anthologies which some of the free offerings are taken from. Of particular interest to me in a ‘cover loving’ way, are the ‘sexy six’ you see above. They’re a range that feature classic authors, and they’re a range that undoubtedly invoke a feeling of cover loving lustiness.

Why do I love these covers so much? Well if you’ve seen my recent ‘cover love’ post on the Melville House ‘Art of the Novella’ series then you’ll know that I love minimal simplicity and colour. These covers from Harper have both of those elements but I love how they’ve made a unique graphic feature of each of the classic authors too.

Normally when it comes to covers for classic works we are either treated to one of a number of ubiquitously available portrait shots of the author (sometimes they really push the boat out and add a colour tint to the portrait )), or else a shot of a vaguely relevant contemporary piece of artwork is used. Fair play it has to be tricky designing cover artwork for a classic work, but Harper’s cover artist (no idea who that was at this time?!? who I now know thanks to David (comments below) is a talented artist by the name of Adam Johnson – here’s his website), seems to have created a triumphant solution in using a ‘cardboard cut-out’ effect for the author, which in my opinion works beautifully and really makes the books all the more yummy, scrummy and desirable. What do you think?

Unfortunately we can’t get our hands on this collection just yet though. They’re not due for release in the US until the end of next month (29th April), but even sadder news for those of us in the UK – release date for this series isn’t until June 1st – Boo! Hoo! (

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‘Cover Love’ offers me the one indulgence of pushing aside the old adage of ‘never judging a book by its cover’, and celebrating with an unadulterated passion, my incurable lust for book cover design.