Botanical Art

Botanical Illustration is the art of drawing plants, often in a scientific capacity.

One of my favorite botanical artists is Ernst Haeckel:





One type of botanical art that I feel really drawn to is of a more fantastical variety:

ese are  from the mysterious Voynich Manuscript




And these are from an amazing book: Codex Seraphinius, which seems to have been inspired by the Voynich Manuscript:














The Codex Seraphinius is basically an encyclopedia of an imaginary world written in an imaginary language that nobody has deciphered, (similar to the Voynich Manuscript, except the Codex Seraphinius might just be nonsense)


I also really like the imagnary botanical art of the creator of the imaginary world of Ilion:

Nonfiction Book Covers

I spend a lot of my time reading nonfiction. I've developed an appreciation for good cover design and an awareness of...less good cover design.

Here's a really nice book cover: Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs, and Steel':



The cover is John Everett's 'Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru"



A more preposterous book cover is this one:



....

And in between we find books like:



(Which has an misleading title for a book that's literally about color perception)

The king of nonfiction book covers is indubitably Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach":