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Originally Posted by Pulpmeister
You're right about Jack of Eagles, fjtorres, that was very typical of the period; BUT, you knew at a glance that you were getting sf, and very often the very name of the author was the largest thing on the cover; a brand name. UK Panther paperbacks of many of Asimov's books had ASIMOV in huge type, one of those more or less generic space hardware images, and then the title. What you saw is what you got: an Asimov SF book.
The problem with the Chocolate Factory cover is that unless you already know all about the book you have no idea what it contains. The vaguely Stepfordish look is oddly creepy, but uninformative.
To me, one of the most striking and memorable of all paperback covers is the Poirot one, on a c. 1970 Fontana edition of Death in the Clouds, in which the murder takes place on a cross-channel passenger plane in the mid 1930s. It shows a vintage airliner with a huge wasp looming above the plane, looking as though it's about to sting the aircraft to death. And yes, the aircraft and the wasp are in the book.
There was a documentary presented by David Suchet in which, among other things, he interviewed the artist who painted that cover (and many other covers) for Agatha Christie books at the time, Tom Adams, and he said that he usually read the book about three times before an image began to consolidate in his mind.
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That Christie cover also made it into an episode of Dr. Who with David Tennant as the Dr.