When I Facetime with my girlfriend I like to prop my iPhone up aginst a copy of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. I fell in love with the Random House logo on the spine. I remember thinking, “Wow, that house IS random.” I thought it would be funny to write some code to generate random houses in the style of this particular random house.

Adam Tschorn‘s LA Times blog post, Voltaire and the not-so-random Random House, explains that the first book published by Random House was Candide in 1928. A painter named Rockwell Kent was commissioned to illustrate the colophone page. His image of a tiny house “...was intended to depict the home where Candide and his companions lived out their days cultivating their garden as described in the last pages of the story.”