Writing a book is no small accomplishment. After countless “final final” drafts, edits, and rewrites, finally holding your manuscript—printed, bound, covered—has to feel pretty much fantastic. The work is done. Now it’s up to the reader to pick it off the shelf or stop their scroll and hit “add to cart.” That’s where words take a back seat to images. Before anyone reads the first sentence you no doubt pored over, they see the cover—and that first impression can make or break everything that came before it.

A well-designed cover might draw someone in and earn a long-term place on a bookshelf or coffee table. A terrible one? Well, it turns out there’s a place for those too. Reddit’s r/TerribleBookCovers is dedicated to sharing some of the weirdest, funniest, and most atrocious examples out there. We’ve stacked a few of our best (worst?) ones for you to check out below.

We’ve all heard that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. We probably first heard the idiom pretty early on in life—from adults trying to teach us that we shouldn’t judge the worth or value of something (most likely people) by appearance alone. And sure, that’s an important lesson—perhaps especially when it comes to people. But whether we like to admit it or not, we form plenty of opinions based on the things we see.

Sometimes, all it takes is a few seconds. It’s why we’re also told that first impressions count— and why designers and marketers put so much thought into everything from packaging and branding to colors, fonts, and images. They know that “consumers buy with their eyes first,” and appearances can influence what catches our attention and what we choose.

And yes, the same applies to literal books and their covers.

Technically speaking, a dictionary will tell you a book is just a set of pages—blank, illustrated, written, or printed—bound between a front and back cover. But just as we know that books are more than just sets of pages, a book’s cover is more than just a protective layer designed to hold those pages together. Sure, that was a purpose they served for hundreds of years. But they weren’t necessarily purely utilitarian, either.

As the Illustration History project notes , book bindings could also serve as a “decorative tribute to their cultural authority,” with luxury medieval manuscripts featuring materials such as gold, silver, and jewels. Over time, though, that decorative role evolved considerably, as new materials and printing techniques opened up new possibilities.

But a book’s cover is also more than decoration. A cover is a strategic choice, one that can help communicate what a book is about, signal who it’s for, and, perhaps most importantly, convince someone to pick it up in the first place. And research backs this up. A 2023 poll of 2,000 Americans found that 57% had bought or read a book based purely on its cover. Interestingly, 96% of those who did say the book largely met their expectations—suggesting that judging a book by its cover doesn’t always lead us astray.