Top of the 2013 Class And then there were 10. This week, we reveal our 10 Best Books of the year, culled from last week's 100 Notable Books. While many of the authors will be familiar to readers of the Book Review, all of them appear on the list for the first time. The Book Review's initial effort to single out the very best books of the year was published in the Christmas Issue of Dec. 1, 1968, which featured 10 books of "particular significance and excellence." All of them were written by men. Caroline Bird's "Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down" appeared on the extended list of noteworthy books. That year's list of the very best included "The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell"; Norman Mailer's "The Armies of the Night"; the final volume of John Berryman's "The Dream Songs"; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle"; and ­Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice." Prior to 2004, the annual colloquy among the Book Review's editors could yield a varying number of citations, and there were consistently more than 10. Seventeen books made the cut in 1976, including Renata Adler's novel "Speedboat," republished this year by New York Review Books. Twenty were honored in 1977, including Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon" and Susan Sontag's "On Photography." Lest you think the editors were simply more generous in olden days, only three books cleared the final hurdle in 1973: "Gravity's Rainbow," by Thomas Pynchon; "The Summer Before the Dark," by Doris Lessing; and "Macaulay: The Making of a Historian," by John Clive. In 1972, only five books were listed, including John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice," about which the editors noted at the time: "Although it was published in 1971, it was not widely reviewed until 1972, because critics needed time to get a grip on its complexities." Blechman's Busy Year In this issue, for the first time, Nicholas Blechman, the Book Review's art director, selects his favorite jacket designs of the year. Blechman came to The Times in 1997 and began his tenure at the Book Review in 2006. "I am drawn to covers that elegantly express an idea, that beautifully integrate type and image, that have a singular vision or visual voice," he told me. This year, Blechman spent six months in Italy, as the recipient of a Rome Prize fellowship. While there, he worked on "Food Chains," a series of drawings "deconstructing food by looking at where it comes from, and how it is made." His most memorable moments included "drawing inside Barilla, the world's largest pasta factory, in Parma." Blechman also published "Night Light," his first children's book, in April. "Having a child of my own was the indirect inspiration for doing a children's book," he said. "All of a sudden, I found myself constantly reading kids" books, digging up books from my childhood while discovering new ones. This put me in the creative frame of mind to write my own.