A beautiful cover must deliver a better quality papercut, because all of these hurt me with their greatness.
I buy lean, yellowed “vintage” paperbacks of all genres. I like reading them, even though the pages are often brittle and fragile. To me, they're kind of Velveteen Rabbits that don't mind having lost ears and button eyes. They want to be handled and read to know they're still loved.
Papercut artist Thomas Allen has conceived a wonderful way to spotlight these beauties, such as this book by the “American Agatha Christie,” Mary Roberts Rinehart's Haunted Lady.
Allen's original papercut from a Max Brand pulp western is even being used, in part, as the cover image of an upcoming collection of the stories of Ned Buntline, The Hero of a Hundred Fights: Collected Stories from the Dime Novel King, from Buffalo Bill to Wild Bill Hickok. Homage wrapped in homage. That's meta.