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Frank Herbert's Dune has had more than several printings. How many different versions of cover art have been used in total, to date? Is there a source where they are all shown together?

If it is necessary, it can be restricted to printings in English, but if possible an enumeration of all distinct works of are would be ideal.

It is not necessary to list them all of course, I'm primarily interested in the number itself supported in some way. A link to a source where they can all be seen would be great!

On the left is the one I'd read, on the right is the 1965 first edition hard cover:

paperback cover of Frank Herbert's Dune paperback cover of Frank Herbert's Dune

Source and Source

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    I had that one on the left with the snake-sandworm too :)
    – Organic Marble
    Commented Sep 10, 2020 at 13:40
  • I've seen publishers slap together books and unrelated cover arts. Any list we come up with will not be exhaustive.
    – svavil
    Commented Sep 11, 2020 at 14:31

1 Answer 1

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P.S This answer does not deserve any upvotes! It is very deficient regarding non-English publications. Namely, in my haste, I only searched under the title "Dune" and neglected to search under the various translated titles, listed on the ISFDB title page for the novel. If you already upvoted, you can retract it now that I've edited my answer.

All the information in this answer is from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

On this page the ISFDB displays the covers of all editions of Dune that it's aware of. This includes many recycled paintings, and also some plain covers with no picture.

An advanced title search with search criteria "Title is exactly dune" and "Title Type is exactly COVERART" retrieved this list of 23 works, which still contains a couple of duplicates (variant titles or forms of the artist's name). After eliminating duplicates I came up with a list of 20 or 21 different works of art by 18 artists, listed below. Images of #10 and #15 were not available; possibly #15 duplicates #12.

Note that this is mainly a list of cover art on English-language editions. However, since I failed to specify "Title Language is exactly English" in my search, it accidentally includes 3 non-English editions (#7, #9, #14) which bear the original title Dune. Many of the titles of translated editions are listed on this ISFDB page.

  1. Henrik Sahlström, date unknown link
  2. John Schoenherr, 1965-01-00 link
  3. John Schoenherr, 1965-03-00 link
  4. John Schoenherr, 1967-00-00 link
  5. Bruce Pennington, 1968-07-00 link
  6. Don Punchatz, 1974-08-00 link
  7. El Cubri, 1975-06-00 link
  8. Vincent Di Fate, 1975-09-00 link
  9. Angus McKie, 1982-10-05 link
  10. Frederic Marvin, 1983-11-00 link
  11. Bryn Barnard, 1984-04-16 link
  12. Gerry Grace, 1988-00-00 link
  13. George Steinmetz, 1990-09-00 link
  14. Dan Alexandru Ionescu, 1992-00-00 link
  15. Gerry Grace, 1999-00-00 link
  16. Grey Thornberry, 2001-00-00 link
  17. Margo Goody, 2007-08-00 link
  18. Sam Weber, 2015-00-00 link
  19. Francis O'Connell, 2015-07-16 link
  20. Alex Trochut, 2016-00-00 link
  21. Matt Griffin, 2019-10-01 link
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    Goodreads also contains much of this information via its editions page. But it wont do all the deduping legwork that you've done here.
    – Jontia
    Commented Sep 10, 2020 at 10:58
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    Here is the Danish cover. Various editions have different fonts and layouts, but share the same cover image. I don't know who the artist is. lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/…
    – Klaus Æ. Mogensen
    Commented Sep 10, 2020 at 13:26
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    I did say explicitly "If it is necessary, it can be restricted to printings in English" in the question. Don't be so hard on yourself
    – uhoh
    Commented Sep 10, 2020 at 14:06
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    Upvoted for the P.S. (Pre Scriptum?). And because you can't tell me what to do. (lol)
    – bracco23
    Commented Sep 11, 2020 at 10:55
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    @DavidW and others who have been posting helpful comments. I don't intend to do any more work on this answer, which is now Community Wiki. Instead of posting comments, you may consider editing your findings into the answer, or alternatively starting a new answer devoted to the cover art on foreign language editions. Thank you.
    – user14111
    Commented Sep 12, 2020 at 0:03

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