As someone who designs a lot of book covers, it can be inspirational (and rather challenging) to gaze upon the work of the masters of the field. Many of them are attractively displayed at the Book Cover Archive. Evocative, startling, confrontational, joyful, spare, ornate, saturated: the covers on display are all that and more. Many of them do a really remarkable job of capturing the zeitgeist of a particular time and place. With its constant fixation on the current moment, will the Internet ever produce such persistent and influential artefacts?