Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual author and illustrator Bradley W. Schenck has released the Pulp-O-Mizer, a free online tool for making your own vintage-looking pulp fiction cover.

As you can see by the image embedded above, we created a GalleyCat logo straight out of classic science fiction magazines. Here’s more about the tool:

The rectangular cover images are a great choice for your blog posts, discussion boards, Twitter, and pretty much anything else… except for Facebook. For Facebook you should select one of the Square options (a square on a white background, or a square on black). Facebook does cruel and unusual things to the rectangular images, but the square cover images have been raised in hardened circumstances and trained to withstand torture. So they’ll be all right…

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Little, Brown Books for Young Readers has released the new cover for the next Lemony Snicket book. When Did You See Her Last? is coming on October 15th.

This is the second book in the “All the Wrong Questions” series, illustrated by Seth. The dispatch also included a YouTube conversation between Snicket and his pseudonymous creator, Daniel Handler.

Snicket also sent a curt letter along with the cover image: “Please immediately listen to THIS which contains a top secret recorded conversation between Daniel Handler and myself, and see the attachment below, which depicts an undisclosed book cover. The more people who are made aware of this classified information the better chance we have of keeping our secret.”

Random House has revealed the cover for megabestselling author Dan Brown‘s new novel, Inferno. The book will be released on May 14th.

The cover features a portrait of Dante, the Italian city of Florence, and a diagram of the nine rings of hell. Inferno will revolve around Dante Alighieri‘s 14th century epic poem by the same name. You can download a free illustrated eBook copy of Inferno. Brown had this comment in the release:

Although I studied Dante’s ‘Inferno’ as a student, it wasn’t until recently, while researching in Florence, that I came to appreciate the enduring influence of Dante’s work on the modern world … With this new novel, I am excited to take readers on a journey deep into this mysterious realm…a landscape of codes, symbols, and more than a few secret passageways.

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Fantasy novelist Patrick Rothfuss posted photographs of dueling author inscriptions on his Facebook today, sparring playfully with Wheel of Time series co-author Brandon Sanderson.

In one reader’s copy of The Wise Man’s Fear, Rothfuss took a crack at a book written by Sanderson: ” more majestic than Way of Kings.” Sanderson wrote a funny comeback in a copy of The Way of Kings: “1000% less sex with random goddesses than Wise Man’s Fear.”

Rothfuss surrendered after this inscription, writing “Well played, Sanderson…. Well played….” on Facebook this morning. (Link via elquesogrande)

When the UK publisher Faber released the cover art for a 50th anniversary edition of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, online critics attacked the controversial cover image.

Below, we’ve collected parody book covers inspired by the updated cover, including A Hunger Games-themed cover, go-go dancers and clowns. What is your favorite?

The London Review of Books wrote about the controversy:

The first edition of The Bell Jar to appear under Sylvia Plath’s name was published by Faber in 1967, with a cover designed by Shirley Tucker. This month Faber have brought out a 50th anniversary edition of the novel (it was first published by Heinemann in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas), with a cover about as far from Tucker’s Bridget Rileyish concentric circles as you can get: a stock photo from the 1950s of a woman with a powder compact. As Dustin Kurtz, a marketing manager at Melville House, tweeted, “How is this cover anything but a ‘f*** you’ to women everywhere?”

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Matthew Owen has won the  Fahrenheit 451 cover design contest from Simon & Schuster and the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

The winning cover (embedded above) was revealed at the ALA Midwinter Meeting.

Owen, who hails from Little Rock, AR, created a cover that beat out more than 360 submissions. Both the Simon & Schuster staff and the Bradbury estate participated in judging the entries.

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On his blog, artist Michael Whelan revealed how he painted the cover for A Memory of Light.

The blog article shares sketches, color tests and materials he used to create the action-packed cover. Darrell Sweet, the original cover artist for the series, passed away, so Whelan took over for the concluding cover of the epic series.

Here’s more from Whelan’s blog: “I digitized all the existing cave and figure visualizations I had accumulated. In Photoshop, I played around with combining them in ways that might work. On my studio laptop, I set up a slideshow of the more appealing approaches and painted the figures selected into the backgrounds I had chosen. These I sent to Irene Gallo at TOR books for selection as a cover approach. Some were more highly developed than others—I learned long ago that the powers that choose such things tend to favor more finished concepts than looser ones—so naturally I tended to favor the concepts I was most interested in developing into a full scale painting.”

To raise money for the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation, a team of five novelists posed for a gender-flipped posed copy of a sexy science fiction cover.

You can bid on an autographed copy of the photograph at eBay. Photographer Al Bogdan shot the picture, imitating the cover of Young Flandry by Poul Anderson. The io9 blog has more about the history behind the pin-up photograph.

Check it out: “This is one of only two 16″ x 16″ high-quality prints, and has been autographed by John Scalzi, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jim C. Hines, Patrick Rothfuss, and Charles Stross, as well as photographer Al Bogdan. This would be a GORGEOUS piece to frame and hang over your couch, in your bedroom, or even in your office at work. You’ll be the envy of everyone you meet! Best of all, every penny raised from this auction will go to the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation, supporting the girls and families fighting this condition and helping to fund research into the cause and, some day, a cure.”

Novelist Mazarkis Williams spotted a hooded man on four different fantasy covers and is offering a “bounty” for readers who can spot more examples in the bookstore.

Last week, the writer promised “a prize of arguably huge value” to anyone who can find the hooded man lurking on other book covers. He also offered “a prize of immeasurably less value” to any reader who can find five covers reusing another image.

Here’s more from the author: “Who is this masked hooded man? Where will he turn up next? Where else has he been already? Putting to one side the issue of this stock-character-of-easy-virtue I hope that the fact four such varied and fine (though I say it myself) novels lurk behind his menace is a fact that puts fresh shine on the well-worn directive never to judge a book by its cover.”

Novelist Neil Gaiman revealed the covers for two upcoming books on Tumblr.

We’ve included the cover image poster for The Ocean at the End of the Lane above. Below, we’ve included links to free posters you can download for your computer.

The author also showed the Chip Kidd-designed cover for Make Good Art, a book version of the commencement address that Gaiman delivered last year.

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