Francis Coradal-Cugat’s original cover art for “The Great Gatsby,” which Baz Luhrmann brings to the big screen next month, depicts a disembodied face floating in a night sky. It is one of the lasting images in literature, but that hasn’t kept book designers from trying to outdo it. The scholar and F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli spent his adult life stockpiling those efforts — pulpy paperbacks, fancy slip-covers, French-flapped foreign editions — and today his trove is not only one of the world’s most complete collections but also an illuminating cross section of 83 years of book design. Now housed at the University of South Carolina, the collection is worth several million dollars but Bruccoli, who died in 2008, claimed he was never motivated by money. “You don’t buy books as an investment,” he said. “You buy them because it gives you pleasure to read them, to touch them . . . to see them on shelves.”
From: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/a-book-by-its-covers/?ref=design-issue