Poe Ballantine’s debut collection of essays details the author’s search for satori via a series of low-paying jobs, bus trips, and stays in residential motels. The cover is an artifact of a mid-1970s motel postcard selected for its red, white, and blue content.

Ballantine’s debut novel, a story of teenage ennui, hard partying, and hallucinogen use in 1970s San Diego. We used an image of our kitchen window and a pattern of transparent Disneyfied ladybugs floating in the middle ground (ladybugs, real or imaginary, being a recurrent motif in the book). The ladybug pattern fades in and out of the book’s text at several transitional points.

For D’Arcy Fallon’s irreverent account of her years at a fundamentalist commune on the Northern California coast, we paired an ancient postcard detail of Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria with our own image of the fog-soaked Pacific.

Scott Nadelson’s nuanced collection of stories documenting the world of one suburban New Jersey family won the Oregon Book Award for short fiction in 2003. The Stanley of the title is the book’s MacGuffin, an elderly cat who totters from story to story, always at the curtain between life and death. The illustration is an X-ray of our late, beloved sixteen-pound Manx, Joe.

The Australian music critic Mark Mordue’s diary of his travels in Asia Minor. We layered images from our collection of Near Eastern printed ephemera into a backlit selfie.

A brief, wonkish digression: We feel that the type on a book’s cover should relate to the type inside, which is why you’ll see a somewhat restrained typographic palette throughout these covers. At this point, we had been using Hoefler & Co.’s Knockout as our sans-serif face; although the word Dastgah is hand-lettered, we wanted it to at least feel like Knockout as used in the text. It’s more or less a monoline crow-quill riff on that typeface: distorted, to be sure, but with its internal proportions maintained.

Kassten Alonso’s debut novel is a neo-Faulknerian reading of the Hades/Persephone myth (Kore, meaning “the maiden,” is another name for Persephone). We opened up our bag of Gothic tricks (Victorian Bible, engravings of dead beetles, etc.) and created an obsessive collage around a portrait of a muddy bathtub. (In the story, a bathtub stands in for the gates of the underworld; the mud you’ll have to read the book for.)

Michael Strelow’s novel concerns a struggle over the health of a river, a struggle between a chemical company and a utility lineman-cum-ecowarrior who has been turned green by accidental electrocution. That’s our hand, and our landscape of the middle Willamette River, where the story takes place. By happy accident, a drawing of the Willamette watershed left over from another job tied the two images together and stood in for the lightning that transformed the hero.

Peter Donahue’s Madison House is a historical novel dealing with the controversial regrading of Victorian Seattle. In a miracle of the internet, eBay delivered a postcard showing the regrading (that is, the leveling with a water cannon) of the self-same hill that forms the novel’s context. Type nerds, please note: the lettering is a Victorianized version of Hoefler & Co.’s Knockout (see Dastgah).

Scott Nadelson’s second collection examines the moments of critical—though not outwardly dramatic—transition that occur in men’s and women’s lives. Nadelson’s stories are largely interiors, and they are jewel-like in their construction and attention to detail. Reading them, we kept thinking about the quality of light and narrative ambiguity in the paintings of Johannes Vermeer. You can’t tell if the girl in Girl with a Pearl Earring is glancing toward you or turning away; we wanted to achieve a similar effect here.

In 2006, Hawthorne began republishing celebrated out-of-print modern titles under its Rediscovery imprint. The inaugural title was Richard Wiley’s PEN/Faulkner winner Soldiers in Hiding, which tells the story of American-born Japanese conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, and examines what became of them in the years following the war.

Illustrator Mark Conahan re-created Rousseau’s jungle on Lawrence Welk’s sound stage for Poe Ballantine’s second novel, which follows the antihero of God Clobbers Us All into the Caribbean wild in search of the noble savage.

Published under the Rediscovery imprint, Toby Olson’s PEN/Faulkner winning Seaview follows a golf hustler across the American desert as he tries to return his dying wife to her childhood home on Cape Cod. The story also involves the cocaine trade, a Pima Indian activist named Bob White, and the abiding presence of Buckminster Fuller’s tensegrity sphere, ably illustrated for the cover by Mark Conahan.

The title of Monica Drake’s celebrated novel is neither ironic nor metaphorical. This book is about clowns and the people who love—and fear—them. Production note/miracle of the internet: it’s now easy to find a rubber chicken when you want one.

A second collection of essays from Poe Ballantine, picking up where Things I Like about America left off. The illustration features an artifact from an old Seventh-day Adventist pamphlet, blown up to show the dot pattern: a visual reference to the cover of Ballantine’s first book.

The third book in Hawthorne’s Rediscovery series was Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s novel Leaving Brooklyn, about a young woman’s coming-of-age and erotic awakening during the McCarthy era. The author hated this cover. This doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

A Rediscovery printing of Tom Spanbauer’s elegant, harrowing debut, evidence that the South cannot claim exclusive rights to the Gothic, whose darkness holds equal sway in rural Idaho.

This book also marked our departure from doing everything in-house: Hawthorne was starting to make a little more money, and so we had some room in the budget for image research and purchase, which is kind of a mixed blessing: we didn’t have to spend as much of our budgeted time scrambling to assemble something from nothing, but the process became more about finding a good fit, rather than making something new. It shows in many of the subsequent titles, which, while perfectly fine, just aren’t as weird as the covers from the first six years.

Hawthorne published the debut of Southern author Gin Phillips, whose rich tale of an Alabama coal-mining town during the Depression returned superb reviews. The “paperback rights” (an odd term, as the first edition was technically a paperback) were subsequently snapped up by Penguin. The cover features a photograph by Eudora Welty, another Southern author you may be familiar with.

Tiina Nunnally’s translation of the Danish novelist Peter H. Fogtdal’s The Tsar’s Dwarf is a dark historical-political romance about those in the periphery of courtly life during Peter the Great’s reign, as seen through the eyes of a female dwarf attached to his court.

A brutal, clear-eyed account of a young man’s descent into hatred and violence, his rise through the ranks of the white supremacist movement, and his ultimate redemption. That’s the author shown on the cover, before he had his tattoos removed.

Loretta Stinson’s bildungsroman follows a sixteen-year-old runaway as she negotiates love, betrayal, violence, and transcendence along the nooks and eddies of the I-5 corridor in the 1970s.

Nudity! And it’s the author! This one had to ship with a bellyband to appease more family-oriented booksellers, yet the cover pales next to what’s inside: a dark, unsparing memoir of drug use, sexual adventure, and questionable impulse control during author Lidia Yuknavitch’s youth as a competitive swimmer.

Scott Nadelson’s third collection of stories continues to plumb the existential depths of New Jersey suburbanites, particularly in regard to the rewards and risks of intimacy.

David Rocklin’s debut novel is set during the revolution in colonial Ceylon and is loosely based on the life of photography pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose portrait of her niece (who would become Virginia Woolf’s mother) is on the cover. In a rare moment of serendipity, this photograph turned out to be the very one that inspired Rocklin to write the book.

Viagra serves as Chekhov’s gun in this riff by Lidia Yuknavitch on Freud’s famous case study of female sexuality; the eponymous protagonist could also be described as a bit of a pill.

The accomplished short-story writer gets jilted at the altar—his fiancée leaves him for a drag king—and uses the experience to turn his remarkable powers of observation on himself during his subsequent period of reinvention.

Jay Ponteri wrote this memoir to investigate and understand the conflict between his identity as a faithful husband and his inner life, which calls him to another woman.

Celebrated screenwriter Anthony McCarten uses the story of the unlikely relationship between inventor Thomas Edison and financier J.P. Morgan to explore the nature of intelligence, the forms it can take, and the ways it can corrupt or transcend. That’s Morgan at lower right; and, yes, his nose did look like that.

Part true crime, part confessional, Love & Terror is an inquiry into an unsolved murder in Poe Ballantine’s tiny Nebraska hometown and an open-handed examination of his rocky marriage.

A dark, funny account of the final days of Ariel Gore’s heroically narcissistic, film noir–obsessed mother. Cover lettering is adapted from the main titles of The Maltese Falcon, her mother’s favorite film.

Tom Spanbauer’s fifth novel examines eros and agape across a thirty-year friendship. The title comes from Auden’s poem “The More Loving One,” a detail of which reads behind the title.

Set in rural Queensland, Australia, Patrick Holland’s novel is a rich meditation on fraternal love and responsibility, and about how our relationship to landscape can define us. The cover image is the Australian night sky, and was taken in the book’s neighborhood.

A digression: Many writers treat landscape as character, and characters are specific. They are not interchangeable. There are a handful of covers here showing land, and without exception it is the general place (within a hundred miles, say) of the landscape referenced by the author. It may be that if we didn’t do this, no one would ever know. But we would know. If we hadn’t been able to find a Queensland sky for The Mary Smokes Boys—a lucky break—we would have done something else entirely.

The second edition of the Portland food writer Liz Crain’s lively guide—not just to restaurants and food carts, but also to the raw materials that feed their kitchens, and yours. Our friend Mark Conahan illustrated the various charms of the Portland food milieu for the cover.

Karen Karbo’s second novel, originally published in the mid-1980s and offered in a completely new edition by Hawthorne in 2014, is a comic romance of art, commerce, and Hollywood during its transition from studio system to marketing machine. The ecosystem of pre-digital film production permeates the text, though we have since wondered whether younger readers will even know what the cloverleaf in the cover illustration is made of.

Megan Kruse’s debut novel is a gripping story of escape, self-discovery, and transcendence set in the Pacific Northwest and the Hill Country of Texas. Cover lettering by Mia Nolting; road image (a conceit we have perhaps used too often) of the Hill Country (about which see commentary on The Mary Smokes Boys, above).

David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman compiled and annotated this paean to brevity and concision—in writing, and in life. Another lucky break: Commercial Type’s Druk, drawn by Berton Hasebe, had just been released when we were working on this: there are other compacted gothics, but Druk is unsurpassed in its ratio of legibility to ink-hogging.

Janet Sternburg’s memoir is also a deep and personal dive into the history of prefrontal lobotomy as expressed through the experience of her brother and sister, each of whom had one. That’s her brother at left.

The first published collection of the essayist Sallie Tisdale’s work, spanning thirty years of difficult and meticulous inquiry. Ms. Tisdale hated this cover. (See Leaving Brooklyn, above.)

Peter Selgin’s memoir examines his growth through the lens of his ambiguous relationships with two men—his father, an accomplished inventor; and his eighth-grade English teacher. This was a rare case of the author’s headshot making it onto the cover. His father’s drawings were readily available through the US patent office.

Kerry Cohen’s memoir is a taxonomy and exploration of female friendships, illustrated by her sister Tyler. Bespoke teenage bubble lettering by Mia Nolting.

A Rediscovery edition of Karen Karbo’s third novel, a darkly comic appraisal of new parenthood.

Jenny Forrester’s debut, a wide-ranging account of the her upbringing on the Colorado Plateau, is part memoir, part meditation on the mythology of family.

Natalie Singer refers to California Calling as a “self-interrogation” rather than a memoir, and though the text does relate her emigration from Canada and subsequent settlement in California during the early 1980s, it spends at least as much time evaluating its author’s decisions as it does illustrating them. Colors here are the actual hues popular in kitchen appliances of the day: Harvest Gold, Rush, Avocado, and Corsair (a like-minded soul on the internet had gone to the trouble of finding and/or measuring their CMYK equivalents).

Poe Ballantine’s third novel under the Hawthorne imprint, a comic muddling of racetracks, mental institutions, swap meets, and the San Diego coast.