Spinning Around the Web

• “Peter Mendelsund estimates he’s designed ‘somewhere between 600 and 1,000 book covers,’ ranging from Crime and Punishment to [The] Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But the self-taught, sought-after designer says he spends a lot of time reading, too. ‘It’s always surprising to people when they come to my office or they walk by my door and they see me with my feet kicked up with a manuscript,’ he tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies. ‘But I read constantly from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep.’” You can listen to all of the interview with Mendelsund, who works for Alfred A. Knopf and Pantheon books, at the National Public Radio Web site. Also check out this other interview with him, from The New Yorker.

• Showcasing Penguin’s “A” to “Z” series of classic novels.

• I guess that when you really get down to it, modern book-cover design can be for the birds. Note these examples of the theme.

• The James Bond-oriented blog Artistic License Renewed talks briefly with artist Bill Botton, whose “work is most recognizable from John Gardner’s Bond novels Icebreaker and For Special Services, as well as Christopher Wood’s Bond screenplay novelizations The Spy Who Loved Me and James Bond and Moonraker.”

• And ever since the first book jackets were created back in the 1830s, “with the sole purpose of protecting books during transport between the printer and the bookstore,” artists and designers have taken it as their charge to make them more beautiful. AbeBooks selects what it says are 30 of the best examples of the breed.