Picture Books and Cover Art - random personal ramblings

I think way more than any non-publishing person should about things like picture books, cover artists, and the use of cover art to market books and authors.  Also about the way some excellent artists cross categories to work in cover art, picture books, etc. while others do not, or do so only at some points in their careers.
Partly this could be explained by my years as a children's bookseller and public library employee, but that would be putting the cart before the horse: I was attracted to those fields in part because I had been obsessively cataloging those types of relations for years and years.

( rambling... )