The Shirley Jackson Book Cover Project

A catalogue of Shirley Jackson book cover scans.

About This Site

The Shirley Jackson Book Cover Project has existed since 2003 in order to catalog Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) book cover imagery for the purposes of analysis, criticism, and discussion.

Shirley Jaskson wrote on a number of different subjects, and one's perception of her is generally colored by whichever of her works you first encountered - most often _The Lottery_, but increasingly _The Haunting of Hill House_. The images (illustrations, photos), excerpts, critical blurbs/quotations, and other text that the publisher (or occasionally the author) chooses to use for a book cover often contributes to the perception of both the book and the author. For example, check out the back cover of some of Popular Library's editions with headings such as "A GEM OF SATANIC SHOCK", "WELCOME WAGON FOR EVIL", "FRIEND OR FIEND?", and "HOSTAGE TO THE DEVIL".

My hope is that by gathering these images together they can be considered in aggregate in order to help foster ongoing discussions about such topics as genre, artwork, gender, and marketing.

When this site was created in 2003, high quality images of book covers were challenging to acquire without purchasing and scanning each book myself. There are definitely still some low quality images here and hopefully I can get them all upgraded.

In 2026, it's much easier to acquire good quality images - often from Amazon - but there is also a flood of illegal and quasi-legal ebook and audiobook editions often with low-effort artwork at best, or low-quality AI-generated artwork at worst. The interesting imagery to track at this point amounts to new limited editions, Penguin refreshing everything every 3 to 4 years, and the occasional interesting non-US covers. I cannot and will not commit to cataloguing every random audiobook cover with a drawing of an old house.

This site previously lived at https://www.rockin-r.net/~karl/shirleyjackson/index.html.

All site content is collected and created by hand. Machine assistance is used for site coding. No ownership is claimed of any of these materials. I made a "best effort" to cite sources, but after 20+ years this page has outlasted many source sites.

This site does not feature ads, cookies, or engage in any kind of user tracking.

I can still be reached at karl at rockin-r dot net/ for questions, corrections, and submissions.

Over the years a number of other interesting sites have attemped similar cataloguing of Shirley Jackson book covers and I'm including a few in this collection links:

Useful links for thinking about book covers in general: