Cover artwork by Kevin Clarke, “Bug Under Glass”; photographed by Becky Hale

Photo by Robert Clark. I have a tiny replica Homo naledi skull—the ancient human ancestors who are the subject of this book— on my bookcase at home, created by the author.

6-color printing with two hits of opaque white ink on a silver foil sheet. Illustrations by Piñata at You Work For Them.

Cover art by Alison Bruns

Image by Visko Hatfield. This was a candid outtake from the shoot, but it felt like the most relevant option at the time.

Those are the actual blood-sucking finches that Darwin collected on said voyage in the Galapagos! They were photographed by Frans Lanting.

Cover illustrations by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Glow in the dark spot gloss on the title as a special surprise.

This charming memoir from the former head of SETI deserved a better cover than the one that was selected. This was my fave as well as the editor’s, so I’m pretending this was the one printed. The image is an old deep-field view from NASA, and they type was going to be metallic silver and black. Sigh.

Magpie painting by the incredible Basil Ede.

Collection of travel memoirs by renowned authors. A.M. Homes cover shot by Steve Weinberg; Geoffrey Wolff painting by Edward Hopper; Diane Johnson artwork by Robert Saunders; Anna Quindlen image by Dennis Galante; Louise Erdrich image by Ray Gehman; Oliver Sacks image by Plamen Petkov.

Illustration of a marine iguana from the Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

I bought this thermometer on ebay for $9.99, and digitally altered the readout to only have 6 degrees. It was German, and came in a little red leather case. I still have it. Photo by Mark Thiessen.

Mosaic photo by Andrea Thompson; mosque image by Roberto Chicano.

Cover photo of Nefertiti bust by Jürgen Liepe

Cover art by personal fave Eric Nyquist

Cover photo by R. Gino Santa Maria, altered by me to look more scary.

Cover art by Julius T. Csotonyi, based upon scans of a nearly complete mummified hadrosaur that was the subject of the book. If you ever need someone to draw you a very accurate dinosaur, I highly recommend Julius.

More covers from the Directions Series. Garry Wills image by Bill Sublette; Barry Unsworth artwork from the Bettman Archives; Howard Norman image by Jim Richardson; Robert Hughes image by Index; Jamaica Kincaid image by Arne Hodalic.

Our Amazon sales rep called this cover “obscene” and “disgusting” when we showed it to the team at our sales conference, so I knew I must be on to something.

If only this cover had more type.

Real, real hard for me to not put a smiley face onto this somewhere, but I contained myself.

Bowl of tomato soup garnished with a map of the world, turned into a butternut squash soup through the magic of PhotoShop, image by eyegelb.

Image of Jacques Cousteau checking his breathing apparatus before a dive from UPI.

Cover art by the always hilarious Giulia Ghigini.

Back at it with more cover art from Giulia Ghigini!

Cover illustration by Eiko Ojala

I can’t remember if this is a Hubble or a James Webb image of a nebula that I altered into a ?, which probably makes me unfit to have even worked on the project.

This is another cover that lives in my “woulda-coulda-shoulda” folder. The image was pulled from the now-defunct stock agency a few days after it was approved, so we had to move on to something else.

After printing out several images of the Earth from space, crumpling them up into balls, and photographing them over and over on my living room floor, I finally captured the priceless shot you see here.

Spot gloss on that O, naturally.

A humorous, witty exploration of the process of grieving, this cover features a casserole baked by the editor (who is also holding it), and a cover photo by Sarah Jun.

Image of Three Ships in a Gale by Willem van de Velde.

Pith helmet by Siede Preis

Artwork by Andreas Lie, using images shot by the authors, Jim and Jamie Dutcher.