I have a book coming out. I have some ideas for the cover, and the marketing folks at UChicago Press will have ideas as well. But I also thought it would be useful to look to other scientific books for inspiration. So: what are your favorite scientific book covers?
This one could be a challenging prompt for y’all; scientific books aren’t noted for their covers.
The cover image of Hubbell’s neutral theory book does a nice job of providing a real-world illustration of a key assumption of Hubbell’s theory: the “zero sum” assumption.* All those tree canopies jammed up against one another, visually illustrating the idea that growth of a new tree is going to have to come at the expense of some other tree. That’s one key job for the cover of a scientific book: visually evoke what the book is about. The cover of Marten Scheffer’s monograph on critical transitions also does a nice job conveying what the book is about. Plus it’s just a really striking photo. If you forced me to pick the best cover for any scientific book I’ve ever seen, I’d probably pick the cover of Marten Scheffer’s book.
Conveying what the book is about is a cover image’s most important job. But it’s not its only job. Another job is just to be an image that the author likes and finds meaningful. For instance, I like the cover of the first edition of my advisor Peter Morin’s Community Ecology textbook. For me, the bare branches of the trees evoke a food web, and I think they do for Peter as well. Plus, I like the color purple. 🙂 Obviously, those are purely personal reasons for liking the cover. But I do think that counts for something, if you’re a book author. Yes, the cover image needs to convey what the book is about, in a way that’s legible to readers. But there’s something to be said for the cover image also being an image that the author likes and finds meaningful, even if nobody else finds the image meaningful in the same way.
So far, I’ve only come up with one other scientific book cover I really like. The cover of the ebook edition of Steven Strogatz’s Sync evokes what the book is about. The birds are all in sync: they’re facing the same direction, and flapping in time with one another. Plus, the cover looks nice. I like that it’s simple graphic design rather than a busy photo.
One kind of image I like, that I’ve seen on scientific posters but never on a scientific book cover, is an image comprised of smaller images of something else. I can’t find it now, but years ago the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences advertised a mathematical biology workshop (I think?) with a poster featuring a bunch of mathematical symbols arranged in the shape of a butterfly. The wonderfully ambiguous caption was “We see it too.” I have some ideas for something along those lines for my book’s cover.
So, over to you. What are your favorite scientific book covers?
*Well, he thought it was a key assumption at the time, but it turns out it’s not.
Related old post:
Cool science graphics (sadly, a couple of the image links are now broken)
Cool pictures of scientists (happily, most of the image links still work)