Alan Powers’ Front Cover: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design is a tremendous amount of fun. What drew me into the book and kept me reading was not the large number of examples and the size & quality of the illustrations, but the attention that Powers gives to typography! Covers are organized by era, and there are some very good examples of work here, including a number that should be much more well-known. His commentary on each era (far more focused on individual designers and historic styles than this type of book usually is) aims the book specifically at designers and the research and commentary makes it much more than just a pretty coffee-table book (although it is quite pretty). The success of Front Cover caused his publisher, Mitchell-Beazley, to print a version dealing with children’s books recently, although that one I have not yet seen.