paperback writer or a book by its cover

I’ve seen a lot of cool vintage exemplars of illustrated book covers in English-languages editions, but German publishers were and are just as adept. It’s an unusual repre- sentational-rate to try to capture the expected thousand words with some abstract art and always results in this strange of sort brutal and non-glossy look. I wonder if a certain publishing house was responsible for this movement or if it was a certain and deliberate reflection of the reigning style of the day.