Designing the cover is usually the last creative step in the process of publishing a book; however, the cover itself is the first element to be seen by prospective readers. Playing an important role in protecting a book as well as in its marketing and selling, the cover serves important communicative functions – it carries messages about the content and cultural identity or even about the emotional load of the book. It may encourage its recipients to read the book or even to explore its non-textual context, sometimes extending the scope of their knowledge about a different culture. The users of signs in the process of creating book covers are their designers and it is assumed that the signs they use are intentional. Recipients have access to the final, relatively simple, multimodal message, consisting of language signs and other graphic elements – colours with their symbolic meanings as well as icons and symbols referring either to the unique content of the book or to the culture with which a given publication is associated. This paper will look at book cover design from a semiotic perspective. It will consider cultural and contextual references on front covers of selected books, including the Polish series Baśnie Świata [Fairy Tales from around the World], some Polish editions of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and the monographs by the author of this paper. It will address questions about the meanings of the used signs in communication between designers and recipients.