Nathaniel Rich, who’s reading at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight, has written a debut novel about a novelist named Constance Eakins called The Mayor’s Tongue. Since just about every major publisher release has its own website nowadays, there is a Nathaniel Rich.com. It’s a cleverly-designed website, but the best part about it is the cover gallery of Constance Eakins books. Supposedly, the fictional Eakins had a great loathing for all of his book covers, which sounds a lot like Nabokov’s hatred of all but—I believe—one of his book covers.

There’s also a Flickr pool where people can contribute their own Constance Eakins book jacket covers. I like the above cover, if just because of the weirdness of the ladies’ legs sticking up in silhouette, but there are some other real joys, too.

I have a ton of paperbacks from the 70’s that look like this:

And this one could be a Gore Vidal paperback from the 70’s or 80’s. It’s a great walk down book design memory lane.