Choosing a book ... by its cover

These for dipping into, not for the delight of looking at the cover -

Claxton: field notes from a small planet, by Mark Cocker; The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: a 21st century bestiary, by Caspar Henderson; Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich

And this one for reading too, though it was the linocut cover (and endpapers) that drew my eye, to the point where I need to get a copy -

Here again it's the cover ... cut out of an endgrain woodblock, so the trees show a strange sort of woodiness -

How delightful to have a shelf full of "secret art" in the form of book covers. A democratic medium?

A different but equally fascinating (to me) topic - "lifting the lid on women's lives" (reviewed here) -

Apologies for the blurry photo - my hand was trembling with excitement...