Published by Alfred A. Knopf on November 20, 1990, Michael Crichton’s best-selling science fiction novel Jurassic Park definitively established its author as “the most commercially successful science fiction writer of all time” (Robinson, 208).

First edition of Jurassic Park; signed by Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg, and Chip Kidd

Designed by American artist and graphic designer Chip Kidd, the novel’s striking dust jacket design remains one of the most recognizable and iconic dust jacket designs of all time and inspired the branding for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Academy Award-winning film adaptation and the subsequent multimedia franchise.

From Mr. Kidd’s personal collection: Japanese translations of Jurassic Park and The Lost World with a Books-A-Million edition of Jurassic Park

First edition of The Lost World; signed by Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg, and Chip Kidd

Published in 1995, the sequel to Jurassic Park, The Lost World, was followed by a film adaptation in 1977 and three subsequent films and series. As of 2000, the franchise had generated $5 billion in revenue, making it one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.

American graphic designer and dust jacket illustrator Chip Kidd at the Raptis Rare Books Jurassic Park at 30 Exhibition

American graphic designer and dust jacket artist Chip Kidd is currently the associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Random House, and has additionally freelanced for Doubleday, Farrar Straus & Giroux, HarperCollins, Penguin/Putnam, Scribner, and Columbia University Press.

The dust jacket designs of Chip Kidd, including Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Haruki Murakami’s Wind / Pinball, Michael Crichton’s Timeline, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men

In addition to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Kidd designed the dust jackets for Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River; Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera; Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, The Road, and The Border Trilogy; Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman; Katharine Hepburn’s Me; Johnathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch, and Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red and Snow.

First editions of each title in Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed Border Trilogy with dust jackets designed by Chip Kidd

First edition of Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch. Dust jacket designed by Chip Kidd.

View all of the first editions with dust jackets designed by Chip Kidd currently in our collection here and view the our current exhibition: Jurassic Park at 30 and the Dust Jacket Designs of Chip Kidd November 18th through November 30th.