I was a little thrown off initially by this collection, too. I can understand the bewilderment many people have expressed here as to why someone would re-create "retro" covers for books that don't exist. What helped me immensely was re-reading the artist's summary of the project, particularly these lines:
The project is an exploration of the intersection of wildlife and architecture through the eyes of an unknown fictional author. The material here was created to represent the reading and listening material of the author.
It seems to me that the artist is creating the shell of a story here. The main character is a fictional author, obsessed and inspired by the intersection of wildlife and architecture. We don't know what the author writes, only that he or she spent a lot of time researching the topic. We do know, the further we look at the covers, that the world this author is living in is not quite ours. This is a world where authors collaborate on the question of "Managing Structural Bird Problems" (is it as simple as keeping birds from building nests in unwanted places? Are we to understand that people construct birds, and need a guide on how to avoid mutations in their work?), or "Ecologies of Decay: Rise of the Post-Urban City" (that feels apocalyptic, and suggests an organic quality to cities that may be different from how we understand them).
The design, for me, seems to be the artist's way of lending authenticity to this world. Since we don't have a text, as in an actual story, and we know essentially nothing about the fictional author who is our main character, we need some tangible element to ground us in the fictional space the artist is creating. Through the design, we can approximate a time and place for this offstage story to be happening. We're in something like the 80s or 90s, or even past 2000, since the 1960-1970s-style books look old and worn. We're probably not far past that (i.e. the year 2500), since the author is still consulting them as valid resources. There's a good chance we're set in America, Australia, or Great Britain. There's some kind of mass insect infestation, and the authors our author reads have different opinions of whether this is a disaster or a situation we can happily adapt to (see "Never Alone: Learning to Love the Life around You," by a doctor, no less). Based on these designs, we can start to fill in the gaps presented by the absence of text and create our own interpretation of what's happening in this world, and what this fictional author/researcher may eventually write.
