FaceOut Books interviews designer Michael Fusco about his striking redesign of Harlem-set noir mysteries by Chester Himes. . . . The Book Design Review rightfully praises the work of Gregg Kulick. (More of Kulick’s work here; click on a black dot to see a cover.) . . . In the market for a gift for someone who has everything? How about a coffee table book that goes for $1,000 and might contain “a chip of extremely rare moon meteorite”? . . . Elizabeth Bachner writes at length about “reader’s block,” her most recent reading habits and Doritos. . . . At the Virginia Quarterly Review, Jacob Silverman notes that a staggering 275,000 or so new titles were published last year, and wonders how we should decide which books get reviewed. He’s pretty sure that Lauren Conrad’s L.A. Candy deserves to be ignored. Yet Salon recently reviewed it, only to call it “one of the most bizarrely meta projects in recent memory: a novel partly inspired by the events of a partly scripted reality show, purportedly written by one of its stars but more likely ghost-written by a novelist pretending to be her.”