According to the popular bookselling web-site AbeBooks, Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf is one of ‘30 Novels Worth Buying for the Cover Alone’. The cover in question is from the 2000 Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, the first North American printing of Heaney's translation. It is an austere, clean design, featuring a photograph of a steel-gray chainmail cowl, seen from the back, on a black background. The title and Heaney's name are printed in the modern sans-serif font Futura Bold, in white. The cover has, in North America at least, attained iconic status: for many readers, it is the poem. But the story of Heaney's translation — or rather, the presentation of it — is considerably more complex than this instant recognition might suggest. The translation was commissioned by W. W. Norton, and it duly appears in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the third item in the venerable textbook that supports what many of us still call the ‘Beowulf to Virginia Woolf ’ survey. But Norton also allowed publication in Britain, by Faber & Faber, and in stand-alone format in North America — this is the Farrar, Straus and Giroux printing. The Faber edition appeared in 1999. The Faber cover is semi-representational, showing drips of black falling vertically across a central roundel of orange and red — I imagine it as the view out from the dragon's barrow, perhaps (it is in fact a detail from the 1986 painting ‘Then Rain’, by the Irish abstract expressionist Barrie Cooke). The cover font is the elegant, serifed Minion. The book is slim, at fewer than 140 pages, and quite small (22 × 14 cm). The American edition, by contrast, is a few centimeters both taller and wider, and double the length — because it presents both Old English and Heaney's translation, in facing-page format. Thus the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition's contents continue the combination of medieval and modern in the cover design, and the extra heft of the book might be seen as a kind of confirmation of its historical importance.

A later edition by Faber sharpens the contrast between the British and North American presentations, as Heaney's Beowulf is now available as part of Faber's Poetry Series, designed by Justus Oehler of Pentagram. The series features ‘typographic’ covers — each book uses three plain colours, and left-justified names and titles, all in one size of the font Perpetua.