Pity George Orwell. His classic never got a decent cover.

You can always tell the jacket designer is in trouble when the cover uses irrelevant type design to get the project over with.

But wait. Orwell sells at least a million copies a year.

It’s not the cover. It’s the book.

Sometimes a great cover can help a lousy book (for a little while).

And sometimes a lousy cover can kill a great book (like Turn of the Century by Kurt Andersen).

But for books, like most things, the stuff inside matters.