book covers

  • #BookBingoNW2023: Chosen by the Cover Part 2

    #BookBingoNW2023: Chosen by the Cover Part 2

    Still working on your Summer Book Bingo? Maybe you haven’t filled in the “Chosen by the Cover” square just yet? Let me suggest a few more books with covers that caught my eye! Endpapers by Jennifer Savran Kelly Set in 2003, a bookbinder finds a queer love letter in a book and becomes obsessed with… Continue reading

  • #BookBingoNW2023: Chosen by the Cover

    #BookBingoNW2023: Chosen by the Cover

    One of the squares in our 2023 Adult Book Bingo challenge is “Chosen by the Cover.” While it is common advice to avoid judging a book by its cover, I have to admit that I love—and can rarely resist—a beautiful book cover. Here are some of my favorite reads that also happen to have a… Continue reading

  • We Dare You…

    As we enter peak fall foliage in the Pacific Northwest we dare you to get swept away by those beautiful colors and read a book by the color of its cover! Here are a handful to choose from, but we highly recommend you explore the stacks – you never know what gem you might find.… Continue reading

  • Three on a Theme: There’s a Rabbit on Your Book

    Two new novels and one of last year’s fiction gems have an obvious link with a distinct long-eared creature on the cover. What these books really have in common, however, is within their pages of bitingly funny fiction. Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum (May 2019) It’s been ten years since we’ve been treated to… Continue reading

  • Scary Covers

    We’ve been writing about Halloween all week, and we want to leave you with some images to haunt you tonight and through the weekend. Here are 25 of the scariest, creepiest, weirdest and most disturbing book, DVD and CD covers we could think of. Continue reading

  • Judging a book by its author photo

    I was on a tight budget in 1989 when a book cover totally seduced me and weakened my fiscally conservative resolve. I’d already read most of the stories in Raymond Carver’s collection Where I’m Calling From when I saw the Vintage paperback at Elliott Bay Book Company. But that photo. I couldn’t walk away. That… Continue reading

  • Books with green covers, literally

    A favorite and fun library display to do is one which is literally a rainbow of covers. Library staff go on the search for books with covers in primary and other major colors. These finds are displayed on book easels. Then the serendipitious time happens with people pausing, contemplating, oohing and chuckling. Keeping in mind that the St. Patrick’s Day holiday is this week, I asked… Continue reading

  • Made you look!

     Will Ferrell & Manny Pacquiao Sing “Imagine.” Hard to resist clicking on that video link, isn’t it? Some books are like that, too. Winking from the library shelf or display, a title captures your attention and you can’t help but reach for it out of wild curiosity. Here are some that put my workday on… Continue reading

  • Trying to judge a Russian book by its cover

    One of the more interesting parts of my job as a librarian for Mobile Services is going on the monthly Russian Day bookmobile run. We visit six low-income housing buildings in Seattle that have a high number of Russian-speaking residents. We bring books, magazines, and movies in Russian and, most importantly, Leszek, a librarian from the Central Library… Continue reading