Quirky Vintage Indian Book Covers From The 1960s To 1980s

Regardless of the genre — be it poetry or prose, short stories, literary criticism or biographies — the literature of the Indian subcontinent has variety of texts like no other, in a multitude of languages that exist in our diverse nation. Each language comes with unique writing styles and traditions, a lot of which gets reflected in the book’s front cover or jacket.

It is believed that earlier many book covers were hand drawn and painted before the printing press really took off, carefully bound, with the final books circulated within a small circuit of peers. India is a treasure trove of book covers considering the vast number of publishers, languages and writers that exist in the country, and it has only grown and prospered over the years since the first printing press was brought into the country by Christian missionaries who wanted to produce copies of the Bible in numerous local languages—it is believed that they first introduced printing and publishing to the country.

If like us, you’re fascinated by the evolution of book covers and images over the years, Quinn Dombrowski’s Flickr stream will be a gold mine. Dombrowki’s been visually documenting hundreds of vintage South Asian book covers from the PK (Indo-Iranian languages and literature) section at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein library, and over the years her collection has grown tremendously. In languages spanning Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati, among many others, Dombrowski’s stream is a lovely blast from the past of vintage pulp Indian covers with vibrant colours, a splash of what seems like pop art and many adoring intricate designs, the best part is perhaps Dombrowski’s funny captions that she posts with each image.

We’ve posted below some of our favourite cover designs spanning 1960s to the 1980s. Click here to visit Dombrowski’s Flickr stream to view more from the collection, which currently has 15 pages of images!