Galleycat links to a Slate piece (”Everyone Will Be Lonely Eight Months from Now,” by Seth Stevenson), whose exploration of “the weird science of stock photography” mentions a different kind of book-jacket trend: the ubiquity of Jennifer Anderson.

Of course, it is possible for an image to become too popular. A few years ago, a model/actress living in Portland did a one-day photo shoot on the campus of Reed College. She frolicked around the grounds and inside a classroom, wearing a purplish hat she’d borrowed from the wardrobe coordinator. The photos taken that day have subsequently appeared in ads for both Gateway and Dell; on the Web sites for a Canadian media planning company, a British science museum, the BBC, Microsoft Finland, Greyhound bus lines, etc.; and on the covers of countless books. She has come to be known as Everywhere Girl, and, yes, she has a blog.

Make sure you follow this link to get the full effect.

For the editor of Reference Books Bulletin, and in fact for anyone involved in any way with reference publishing, an ALA conference can be a sobering experience.  The recent ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim was no exception.  On Friday evening, I attended the Books for Youth Forum and got a face full of  fun (excited audience, upbeat speakers). I didn’t have a chance to go to the Adult Books program on Saturday, but you can read Keir’s  post about it to see that it was a thoughtful discussion about books and ideas. In contrast, the standing-room-only Reference Books Bulletin Editorial Board program (The Future of Electronic Reference Publishing: A View from the Top)  on Monday morning addressed the hard, cold question we’ve been grappling with for the past several years. Is print reference dead? Short answer, yes.  In fact, we’ve moved beyond the old print vs. electronic discussions.  Now, the discussion seems to be more about reference databases vs. Wikipedia and Google. At the program, as  I listened to top executives from Gale, Oxford, Britannica, and Sage talk about their next big challenges, I got a sense that digital reference publishing has moved out of its infancy, and is now in adolescence, poised for change and faced with many outside pressures and alluring possibilities,  while the parents try to maintain some semblance of control, while not seeming to be hopelessly out of step.

Despite the generally downbeat mood over the past few conferences, there are in fact plenty of exciting things going on in reference publishing, and you’ll be hearing more about these in upcoming issues of RBB.  As for me,  I’ve reached the acceptance stage in the process of grieving over print (though I do feel nostalgic for all those big, resource-wasting, self-limiting, instantly out-of-date books it used to give me so much pleasure to browse through).  One consolation is that some day, with your e-reader tucked in your bag,  it’s very likely that you’ll be hearing ”is print dead?” discussions at the Booklist Books for Youth and Adult Books programs.

RBB Editorial Board Chair Sue Polanka, who moderated the RBB program, has posted some reports about it on her blog, No Shelf Required, and is also working on a write-up for Booklist Online.

In New York (”A Warming Trend“), Christopher Bonanos noticed a sweet new book-jacket trend:

I love this stuff, although I usually find out about it second-hand: most of the books that I review have plain paper covers. Seen a good trend lately? Let me know!

And, whether you’re hunting for trends or just like to look at interesting book jackets, take a look at The Book Design Review.

How this book cover:

. . . . turned into this one:

From Publishers Weekly (”Little, Brown’s After the Fire Jacket, Before and After,” by Lynn Andriani):

Editor Geoff Shandler explained: “We had a good response to the type jacket, but there was thought that was it too abstract in some way. When the story is so hopeful in the end, was it too dark—literally?” The new jacket shows the book’s central characters, Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, victims of the fire, walking side by side. One has a friendly hand on the other’s shoulder, and they seem relaxed and happy. “It’s cliché,” said Shandler, “but a picture can help tell a story. The emotional bond between those boys, which is so strong, wasn’t necessarily coming across in the original jacket. Now it does. You have a sense of friendship, of journey. You see them there and see that they have made it.”

(From Dan Kraus, who was correct that I get a kick out of this stuff.)

Just read a terrific essay by Luc Sante about his personal library (”The Book Collection That Devoured My Life,” the Wall Street Journal):

I’m not a snob about books, but I’m probably a show-off — as who isn’t? My showing-off is of a pretty low-key if not completely abstruse sort, though. No one has ever noticed — much less commented upon — my collections of minor German Romantics, accounts by UFO abductees, books by and about hoboes, or memoirs by former employees of the New York Evening Graphic. It’s rather a closed circle; I impress myself.

Armor and ammunition for the many among us who find ourselves having to justify, often to otherwise entirely reasonable spouses, why we own books we may never read.

For those of you interested in judging books by their front covers, PRINT Magazine chronicles a trend with legs (”One Leg Leads to Another,” by Steven Heller).

(Thanks, Dan!)

Frankly, I think boys and girls now have too many options for everything: danger, mischief, and…um, stuff.

More timely old stuff: lifehacker’s 13 Book Hacks for the Library Crowd.

Most of us spend a lot of time in the virtual world these days, but that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate a good book every now and then.

From your local library to the classroom to the bookstore, there are a lot of tools available to help you save time and money when it comes to the bound world of information. Today, in the interest of lifehacking your bookshelf, I’m rounding up my favorite 13 “book hacks” for getting the most from your bound literature.

This has been stuck in my in-box for a staggeringly long time, but these books are timeless, so I forgive myself. The Rare Book Room offers, well, here:

The “Rare Book Room” site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

Over the last ten years, a company called “Octavo” embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).

This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.

So whether it’s Gutenberg’s Bible of 1455 you’re after, or the Magna Carta, or indeed Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (the perfect reading accompaniment to The Rule of Four),

How could I have missed this? On Nerdworld, Matt Selman offers The Unabridged Rules of Library Management. (Personal libraries, that is.)

RULE #1: THE PRIME DIRECTIVE – It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it. Therefore, to be placed on Matt Selman’s living room bookshelves, a book must have been read cover to cover, every word, by Matt Selman. If you are in the home of Matt Selman and see a book on the living room shelves, you know FOR SURE it has been read by Matt Selman.

Ezra Klein responds:

No, this is all wrong. Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read — those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson.

And, at Inside Higher Ed, where I stumbled across this, Scott McLemmee has some fun with it (”Bookshelf and Self“):

My experience (which can’t be unique) is that some books end up accumulating out of a misguided attempt to win the approval of authors already well-entrenched on my shelves. A few years back, for example, Slavoj Zizek started to insist that I had to be familiar with the work of Alain Badiou - a French poststructuralist philosopher whose work I had never heard of, let alone read. Well, OK, sure. Thanks to some busy translators, Badiou volumes started crowding in, next to all the Zizek titles.

But in short order, Badiou lets it be known that I am expected to understand something about mathematical set theory - and furthermore should come to appreciate one particular approach to formalizing the basic axioms. Chances are, that second part is just not going to happen. I am willing to try to learn to recognize a formalized axiom when I see one, but can promise no more, and even that much is probably pushing it. So, anyway, off to the nearby secondhand bookshop in search of a couple of introductory works. They are terrifying. The shelf in question is starting to turn into a neighborhood I am afraid to visit.

His actual conclusion is much more sensible. But I realize now that I haven’t given the subject nearly enough thought. I’m constantly acquiring books and constantly ordering more bookshelves–about the most thought I give to what goes where is a general attempt to keep like with like. There’s a crime fiction section, a literary fiction section, a poetry section, a film section…but due to the unpredictable sizes and numbers of my books, there are odd little colonies, like the crime fiction that seems to be attacking the poetry.

And I love having hardcovers around to look at, whether I’ve read them or not–having lots of unread books around sustains my hope that I’ll actually live the 537 years required to read them all–but in terms of shelf space, one hardcover equals three paperbacks and so I tend to keep more of the latter.