14 Picador 40s

Over the years the once-classy-looking Picador series has come to look a bit neglected: absorption into the Macmillan behemoth, often so-so cover designs, and a steady bleeding of their top authors to other publishers have all contributed to this. (The Australian arm of the company is something of an exception to this, with a strong set of authors and books.) But for the imprint's 40th anniversary, they are redesigning a number of their top books with dramatic monochrome covers in black, grey and white. Click for much bigger versions. Designers as yet unknown. Neil Lang, senior in-house designer at Picador, designed these. Note that 4 of them have been updated--see the end of the post for the final versions.

The only disappointing one here, since it's just the boring old cover in silhouette

And from the Australian contingent:

UPDATE: The updated final versions referred to above...