Designers: quiet, unassuming, sensitive types who pluck ideas from art heaven and make them into beautiful book covers. Or so I thought until one day I went upstairs and found this: The Shelf of DOOM

This horror show of broken bones, doll’s heads, skulls, and scorched cuddly toys are some of the props that are used to make book jackets. I talked to curator of the Shelf of Doom, Glenn, about the collection of oddities, and also asked him which was his favourite cover at the moment.

The Gone-Away World and its cover source, a hacked up copy of Mark Twain’s Diaries

‘A key part of The Gone-Away World is the Jorgmund Pipe, which circles the globe and is on fire. We wanted to re-create this and make it look like the book is splitting in half. We used a Stanley knife and an old copy of Mark Twain’s diaries - older books have better quality paper for tearing. (Sorry Mr Twain, it was nothing personal.)’

Aged photos and The Moment

‘We used tea and coffee to age this photo, then scanned it in repeatedly to give it an aged look.’

Bones prop and 206 Bones

‘These are fake prop-bones that we bought on Ebay. We sprayed them with dirt and tied them with string to make the occultish-cover image.’

A broken violin and The Echo Man (modelled by Harvey)

‘The blowtorch is the secret weapon in design: this broken violin instantly looks more sinister once it’s been burnt.’

Skull and burnt bumblebee

‘The bumblebee at the back (blowtorch again!) was for a cover that didn’t make it - perhaps we’ll use him somewhere else.’

Tins of spam and fried breakfasts

‘I haven’t found a use for these tins yet but I will: I love collecting weird stuff like this, you never know when it’ll come in handy. So now we have a shelf full of spam - delicious!’

Glenn’s favourite cover

‘My favourite cover…I guess that’s usually the most recent one published, as it’s the freshest. This week Pocket Notebook early copies came in. I like the blunt depiction of the priapic deranged copper on the front.  Also the type, which is Clarendon Bold: it’s rather ugly and I don’t think I’ve ever used it before, but it seems perfectly appropriate here.’

My thanks to Glenn for giving us access to the shelf, and a little peak at the strange world of cover design.