Lolita Cover Archive

Posted on by Biblioklept

Checkout this great cover gallery archiving over 150 covers of Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece Lolita. A few favorites–

This 1957 Swedish cover is a pretty subtle/creepy upskirt.

1962, Brazil.

A 1964 LP with Pop Art undertones–seems a little too frank.

This 1970 Italian cover seems to be the earliest “girl in socks” theme that pops up again and again in the archive.

This 1972 Norwegian cover picks up the voyeur theme again, but it seems awfully goofy.

The poster for the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation inspired a rash of bad covers, but I think that this 1977 German cover works really well.

A Lebanese edition from 1988. Pretty and simple.

Balthus and Lolita seem like a natural fit, if a bit too obvious. I counted two other covers sporting Balthus paintings in addition to this 1995 English edition.

This Polish cover from 1997 is nine kinds of creepy.

Published by Biblioklept

9 thoughts on “Lolita Cover Archive”

    1. I haven’t looked for it on ebay, Ellyse, but I do know that there’s a version of it that you can track down on torrent sites. I have an American version of Lolita from 1995 or 1996.

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    1. Interesting that author Vladimir Nabokov eldsensly digressed on what was and wasn’t pornography. A moot point should be just that, why tire on about the subject? He states in a letter that his novel is a tragedy. There is nothing of the tragic in Lolita. The protagonist is a muddling, ineffective, fall away man. His particular reality finds him immersed in the ordinary, a book dusty gnat that needs shooing away. There is no tragedy in lust or acting on an urge. To play out a tragedy one needs an epic character or an epochal moment in time so as to frame out the rise and fall. Humbert Humbert is exactly that, two of the same name, two in the crowd and so banal you have to squint to actually see him.

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