Classics

15 New Reader-Designed Covers for Classic Books

Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Chief of Staff

Rebecca Joines Schinsky is the executive director of product and ecommerce at Riot New Media Group. She co-hosts All the Books! and the Book Riot Podcast. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaschinsky.

One of the coolest things I saw at Book Expo America was a project called Recovering the Classics, which is a collaboration of the Creative Action Network and DailyLit. These awesome folks identified 50 of the best books that are in the public domain (meaning they’re not longer under copyright) and invited readers to design their own new covers. Then they make the newly covered books available for purchase as ebooks or as paperbacks printed on the Espresso Book Machine at Harvard Bookstore. This project? It’s turning cool up to eleven.

Let’s take a look at some of the new covers, shall we? These are some of my favorites–there are TONS to explore at Recovering the Classics.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, cover by Roberlan Borges