I just got a hold of the beautiful new Taschen book Alex Steinweiss: The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover.  It was strange to think there was a time when there wasn’t album cover artwork, be it beautiful, clever, or just provocative. (Though I suppose I should get used to that time again with music as physical object quickly disappearing!)  It reminded me of other books about album covers I have enjoyed.   Check them out.  The list includes retropectives of album cover artists like Steinweiss, Flora, and Warhol; collections of genre-specific album covers (jazz, disco, hip-hop anyone?); and odd little gems about sleevefacing and Mingering Mike, a soul artist whose entire career is the invention of a teenage boy living in a D.C. ghetto.  

The highly anticipated sequel to Jennifer Johnson is Sick of Being Single, entitled Jennifer Johnson is Sick of Being Married, will be released in October. Reserve your copy on Hennepin Library's catalog today!

The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes were announced this week, but alas, no prize was awarded for Fiction. This has not happened since 1977. The jurors read some 300 books but none was chosen for the coveted prize. A few came close: read more about it.

BookSpace has a list of the Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction, nonfiction and poetry for the past ten years.

Dora Saint, known to millions of readers as Miss Read, died April 7 at the age of 98. The first Miss Read novel, Village School, was published in 1955. "In the world of Miss Read, almost no problem was so great that it couldn’t be solved by a glass of milk, a good cup of tea and the passage of time," says the Washington Post.

Help the Pew Research Center understand your use of digital technologies and how it affects libraries in the 21st century by taking this survey.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project's most recent publication indicates the average eBook reader is reading more books than non-eBook readers. Other interesting statistics are also mentioned in the article, The Rise of E-Reading.