The present study examines two book covers to discover how their telling images and condensed tales of war are related to the books’ interior content. We scrutinize A’zam Hosseini’s Da (2008) and its English translation by Paul Sprachman, One Woman’s War: Da (Mother) (2014). Since Da has been standing in Iranian best sellers list for a decade, it is considered as a paragon of popular national literature. Given the proclivity of books’ designers to exploit marketing strategies on the covers, the study reflects on how they harness the power of those strategies for the greatest ideological gain. We demonstrate how designers utilise paratextual elements as external and commercial mediators of the inside text, thereby conjuring up founding myths of individual and national Iranian identity. It is concluded, against the famous old saying, that a book is designed to be judged by its cover.

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