The Shirley Jackson Book Cover Project

A catalogue of over 550 Shirley Jackson covers.

About This Site

The Shirley Jackson Book Cover Project launched in 2003 with 118 scans in order to catalog Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) book cover imagery for the purposes of analysis, criticism, and discussion.

The site previously lived at https://www.rockin-r.net/~karl/shirleyjackson/index.html. It went some time without updates, but in May 2026 was refreshed with more than 550 images total and moved to its own dedicated site.

Site Goals

Shirley Jackson wrote in multiple genres, and one's perception of her is generally colored by which of her works you first encountered. This is most often "The Lottery", but increasingly has become The Haunting of Hill House. The images (illustrations, photos), excerpts, blurbs, and other elements that the publisher chooses to use for a book cover contributes to the perception of both the book and the author. For one example, check out the back covers of some of Popular Library's editions with headings such as "A GEM OF SATANIC SHOCK" (The Lottery), "WELCOME WAGON FOR EVIL" (The Road Through The Wall), "FRIEND OR FIEND?" (Hangsaman), and "HOSTAGE TO THE DEVIL" (The Witchcraft of Salem Village).

Even grouping book covers by title and/or contents can become complicated depending on changes made by the publisher. For example, the story "The Lottery" first appears (in a book) in the book named after it - The Lottery, or, The Adventures of James Harris. Later editions of the book have variable titles including simply The Lottery or The Lottery and Other Stories and some replace or modify "James Harris" with the text "Demon Lover". After Jackson's death in 1965 there have been a few notable collections of her previously-uncollected short work: Come Along With Me (1968), Just an Ordinary Day (1997), and Let Me Tell You (2016). Also in 2016, selections from Come Along With Me and Just an Ordinary Day would be grouped together with four additional short works under the title Dark Tales. And then in 2019, "The Lottery" would be added to Dark Tales resulting in collections entitled The Lottery and Other Dark Tales. I'll leave the consideration and discussion as an exercise for the reader: What does it mean to label Jackson's stories as "dark"? How should we think about the fact that "The Lottery" ends up attached to such a collection and takes over the title?

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. One key differentiator of this site versus others is the inclusion of back cover scans when available.

Technical and Practical

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. It is very much the case that I have occasionally purchased books simply to obtain good scans for this site.

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. Goodreads, in particular, suffers from a large number of homemade bookcovers. In addition, there are many sites containing school graphic design projects or artists portfolios - images of an artist's idea of a book cover but not actually used as such. The most interesting imagery to track at this point amounts to new deluxe editions, Penguin refreshing their offerings every few years, and the increasing number of translated editions.

Some thoughts about image sources:

All site content is collected and created by hand. Machine assistance is used for site coding only. I do make an effort to cite sources, but those updates lag and after 20+ years this page has outlasted some of the original source sites. All images are hosted locally for reliability and performance.

Privacy

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

Legal

No ownership is claimed of any of these materials. Images are reproduced without permission of the original owners for the purposes of juxtaposition, commentary, and discussion. Image quality should be sufficient for readability but not sufficient to support illegal reproductions. If you are a rights holder and want an image removed, please contact me.

Contact

I can still be reached at karl at rockin-r dot net for questions, corrections, and submissions. I'm especially interested in corrections (lots of metadata here is incomplete or incorrect), back cover scan, improved image quality, and international editions.

Links

Shirley Jackson links

Shirley Jackson book cover links

Over the years a number of other interesting sites have attemped similar cataloguing of Shirley Jackson book covers:

Other book cover links

Useful links for thinking about book covers in general: