BROTHERS OF COSSACK METTLE

It's often tricky to find digitized public domain historical images for particular subjects if you don't have the time or budget to order custom scans from an archive such as the New York Public Library or Library of Congress. You can spend hours in archives and end up with only only a handful suitable to appear on a cover, and often the majority of the time spent on a book like this is research alone. The painting on the cover by Ilya Repin (1844–1930), which actually appears in the Cossacks entry on Wikipedia, is fairly well known but also one of the best images out there. Combining it with evocative type and careful cropping creates a unique perspective that distinguishes it from other instances where that same image may also appear.