The classical Hardy-Littlewood maximal operator is bounded not only on the classical Lebesgue spaces $L_p\left({ℝ}^d\right)$ (in the case $p>1$), but (in the case when $1/p(·)$ is log-Hölder continuous and $p_{-}=inf\{p\left(x\right):x\in {ℝ}^d\}>1$) on the variable Lebesgue spaces $L_{p(·)}\left({ℝ}^d\right)$, too. Furthermore, the classical Hardy-Littlewood maximal operator is of weak-type $(1,1)$. In the present note we generalize Besicovitch’s covering theorem for the so-called $\gamma$-rectangles. We introduce a general maximal operator $M_s^{\gamma ,\delta }$ and with the help of generalized $\Phi$-functions, the strong- and weak-type...