John Gall’s cover for Shelley Jackson’s The Melancholy of Anatomy presses a lot of my personal design buttons: medical illustration, images turned sideways, type on a label, and a combination of a sans-serif typeface and a serif one. What I like best about it is that there’s a whole lot of possible creepy going on (the disembodied eyeballs on the spine would probably be a dealbreaker for a lot of people) but Gall somehow reins it all in so that it looks more like a museum display than a horror show. I think it’s the label that does it, and the slightly modern sans-serif typeface used for Stories and the author’s name. I would have been tempted to slide that author name over to line up with the right end of Stories, but Gall keeps it modern and throws off your expectation by aligning those two elements differently, centering Jackson’s name beneath the label. It’s an unusual, subtle choice, and it pays off. The whole package is a winner.