A book cover is any protective covering used to bind together the pages of a book. Beyond the familiar distinction between hardcovers and paperbacks, there are further alternatives and additions, such as dust jackets, ring-binding, and older forms such as the nineteenth-century "paper-boards" and the traditional types of hand-binding. This article is concerned with modern mechanically produced covers.

Before the early nineteenth century, books were hand-bound, in the case of luxury medieval manuscripts using materials such as gold, silver and jewels. For hundreds of years, book bindings had functioned as a protective device for the expensively printed or hand-made pages, and as a decorative tribute to their cultural authority. In the 1820s great changes began to occur in how a book might be covered, with the gradual introduction of techniques for mechanical book-binding. Cloth, and then paper, became the staple materials used when books became so cheap—thanks to the introduction of steam-powered presses and mechanically-produced paper—that to have them hand-bound became disproportionate to the cost of the book itself.

Gail Carriger is the pen name of Tofa Borregaard, an archaeologist and author of steampunk fiction. She was born in Bolinas, an unincorporated community in Marin County, California, and attended high school at Marin Academy. She received her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, a masters of science in archaeological materials at England's Nottingham University in 2000, and a master of arts in anthropology (with a focus on archaeology) at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2008.

Carriger's first novel, Soulless, was published in 2009 by Orbit Books and earned her a nomination for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. The book was a Compton Crook Award nominee, a Locus Award finalist for Best First Novel, and Locus placed her on their recommended reading list. Her second novel, Changeless, was published in early 2010 and earned her a place on the New York Times Bestseller List. Her third novel, Blameless, was released in September 2010 and also became a New York Times bestseller. The planned five-book series continued with Heartless in late June 2011 and concluded with Timeless in March 2012. Carriger was the guest of honor at FenCon, a science fiction convention in Dallas, Texas, in September 2011. Carriger lists "PG Wodehouse, Austen, Dickens, and Victorian travel journals" as influences on her writing.

Suzanne Nadine Vega (born July 11, 1959) is an American songwriter and singer known for her eclectic folk-inspired music.

Two of Vega's songs (both from her second album Solitude Standing, 1987) reached the top 10 of various international chart listings: "Luka" and "Tom's Diner". The latter was originally an a cappella version on Vega's album, which was then remade in 1990 as a dance track produced by the British dance production team DNA.

Vega was born July 11, 1959 in Santa Monica, California. Her mother, Pat Vega, is a computer systems analyst of German-Swedish heritage. Her father, Richard Peck, is of Scottish-English-Irish origin. They divorced soon after her birth. Her stepfather, Ed Vega, also known as Edgardo Vega Yunque, was a writer and teacher from Puerto Rico.

When Vega was two and a half, the family moved to New York City. She grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side. At the age of nine she began to write poetry; she wrote her first song at age fourteen. Later she attended New York's prestigious High School of Performing Arts (now called LaGuardia High School). There she studied modern dance and graduated in 1977.