Ever wondered how book designs are created? Think you have to be a whizz at Photoshop and advanced Illustrator? Granted, basic techie skills are necessary, but sometimes it’s more creative – and certainly more fun! – to do it the old-fashioned way.

Windmill Books have recently proved their creativity with their post about the aptly named Shelf of Doom – a shelf for all the weird, wonderful and often slightly macabre props used to make the finished covers. The story behind their blowtorched violin on The Echo Man was in fact picked up by the Guardian Books Blog who also recently entertained us with interesting news about publishers and their ‘extreme’ book design.

Top of the list of our cover-work escapades has to be the morning we spent rifling through the stunning period costumes at the (now defunct) BBC Costume Department to choose the four dresses to be modelled for the covers to The Galliard and our Elizabeth trilogy, by Margaret Irwin.

If only we could have kept these dresses on our cover shelf – to use as props for future historical fiction covers… or to swan around the office in a corset and skirt just for the sake of it.

Lara Crisp, Managing Editor