The 50 Best Slaughterhouse-Five Covers from Around the World
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, turns 50 this week. Originally published on March 31, 1969, the novel—a genre-bending WWII story about a soldier who becomes “unstuck in time”—was Vonnegut’s first to become a bestseller, and 50 years later, it’s still his most beloved and influential. Many a teenage mind has been blown by Slaughterhouse-Five, and many an adult mind, too. To celebrate the birthday of this essential American novel, I looked at how it’s been covered over the years—both at home and abroad. Some of the below covers are beautiful, some impactful, and some simply odd, but they all make me want to read the book again.
First Edition cover, Delacorte, 1969
Mondadori (Italian), 1969
Gyldendal (Danish), 1969
Meulenhoff (Dutch), 1970
Hoffmann und Campe (German), 1970
Dell first edition paperback, 1971
Kirjastus Eesti Raamat (Estonian), 1971
Mladá fronta (Czech), 1973
BIGZ (Serbian), 1973
J’ai Lu (French), 1973
Dell paperback, 1976
Editorial Bruguera (Spanish), 1977
早川書房 (Japanese), 1978
Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó (Hungarian), 1980
Vintage, 1982
Military Publishers (Bulgaria), 1982
Mondadori (Italian), 1988
Polish edition, 1990
Dell paperback, 1991
Vintage 1991
Swedish edition, 1996
Vintage UK, 2000
Maecenas Könyvkiadó (Hungarian), 2001
Anagrama (Spanish), 2006
Kitos knygos (Lithuanian), 2006
Argo (Czech), 2008
Folio Society, ill. John Holder, 2008
АСТ Москва (Russian), 2009
Bertrand Editora (Portugese), 2011
Tammi (Finnish), 2012
Norstedts (Swedish), 2013
AST (Russian), 2014
Feltrinelli (Italian), 2014
Видавництво Старого Лева (Ukranian), 2014
ART (Romanian), 2014
Helikon (Hungarian), 2014
April Yayıncılık (Turkish), 2015
დიოგენე (Georgian), 2015
Penguin Australia Vintage Classics edition, 2016
麥田出版社 (Chinese), 2016
Slovart (Slovak), 2016
HoCa – Belletristik (German), 2016
Points (French), 2016
Argo (Czech), 2016
Gyldendal (Danish), 2016
ART (Romanian), 2017
Knygos (Lithuanian), 2017
Zysk i S-ka (Polish), 2018
Penguin UK Vintage Classics, 50th Anniversary Edition, 2019
Intrínseca (Portuguese), 2019
