Tractable covers are introduced as a new ap proach to equivalence-preserving compilation of propositional knowledge bases. First, a gen eral framework is presented. Then, two specific cases are considered. In the first one, partial interpretations are used to shape the knowl edge base into tractable formulas from several possible classes. In the second case, they are used to derive renamable Horn formulas. This last case is proved less space-consuming than prime implicants cover compilations for every knowledge base. Finally, experimental results show that the new approaches can prove effi cient w.r.t. direct query answering and offer significant time and space savings w.r.t. prime implicants covers.