Fantastic Metropolis

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Forrest Aguirre

Its heft and its feel. I tend to like heavy books that have some texture. I like to touch embossments and stipling on older books, particularly. Running my fingers over 100 year old books is particularly exhilarating, as I wonder whose finger oils will now mingle with mine to slowly decay the pages.

Hawk Alfredson

Books are soft enough to read in bed.

Neal Asher

After years of reading pleasure, my love of books is so deeply embedded in my psyche that it would be difficult to find all its roots. I suppose it could be comparable to a terminal nicotine addict’s love of an unopened packet of cigarettes. As opposed to other mediums… you can read [books] on the crapper.

Dale Bailey

I love the pristine condition of a new book—the tight binding, the clean pages, the unfrayed dust jacket, the sense of possibility, of new worlds waiting to be discovered.

R. M. Berry

That it does not start or end where it starts or ends. There’s something strange about the fact that the material object (the book) is not identical with the composition (the book).

K. J. Bishop

Its portability. Though there’s also an undeniable charm about huge, heavy old tomes that can hardly be lifted, much less popped into a handbag for reading on the train. The book, I think, adds a little bit of excess meaning to a text; there’s symbology and mythology in the book’s physical form. As physical objects, my favorite books are the kind with very fancy bindings—embossed leather, gilding, metal corners, the kind of books that look like they’re made out of pimps’ shoes—but I can’t afford to collect them: I just stand with my nose pressed against antiquarian bookshop windows. My favorite books, as sensual objects, are the deluxe books in Des Esseintes’ library. I’m grateful to Huysmans for describing them, as the description is so vivid that the books take definite shape in my mind, and in that sense I own them, without having to pay for them!

Richard Bleiler

I like its solidity, the tactile contrasts between the glabrous feel of the dust wrapper and the slightly rougher feel of the paper. I like the contrasts of colors between the two. I like the smell, the weight, the typography. I like the occasional imperfections in paper and binding and layout. I like the feel of the text block and the way some books have deckled edges and others have uncut pages and still others are gilt; and old gilt edged books, ones in which the gilt has faded to a shabby gentility, are lovely. As are colored end pages and sewn caps and calf skin bindings and books with boards.

Jonathan Carroll

Its weight and smell—the fact it is a substantial physical object in your hand.

Jay Caselberg

It has weight and substantiality, a feel that you know is there and present as the words are.

Michael Chabon

When it is old, its odor. The way certain favorite books fit into the hip pocket of certain favorite jackets. The way a book can serve as a repository for a photograph, a ticket stub, a feather or a leaf.

Michael Cisco

It is silent. Patient. It waits for me to animate it, and to animate me in turn. This patience and quietness are related, and both in turn related to the book’s relationship to time. Real books are created to endure for the benefit of unborn persons, like time capsules. They act as silent witnesses, whose testimony is immediately available.

Brendan Connell

I like to have my walls lined with books; see them piled up in artistic disorder on my desk, on the floor. (I hate to see their pages folded, written on, or defaced.)

John Coulthart

A small object but immensely powerful. It can be the repository for complete trivia or for ideas that change the world. It can hold an entire universe between its covers.

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Ian Covell

Its physicality. An attractive cover.

Peter Crowther

I just adore books… the smell of them, the riffling sound of pages being flicked, the actual feel of the stock, a well-thought-out cover, and even flaps on paperbacks. I’m a complete sucker for flaps on paperbacks—it would be far cheaper for us to drop the paperback flaps from our PS Publishing line [of books] but I’m holding off from doing that until I’m absolutely forced into it.

Jack Dann

For me, books are physical objects. I love beautifully bound books, illustrations, acid-free paper, i.e., the book as a physical work of art.

Ellen Datlow

I like the look of a beautifully designed book.

Alan DeNiro

Actually, I ran into a great Karl Marx quote about that: “Our time has no longer that real taste for size that we admire in the Middle Ages… You do not need to read the books; their exciting aspect suffices to touch your heart and strike your senses, something like a Gothic cathedral. These primitive gigantic works materially affect the mind; it feels oppressed under their mass, and the feeling of oppression is the beginning of awe. You do not master the books, they master you.” So yeah, what that Karl guy said.

Cory Doctorow

Its portability and cheapness. But I hate the book as a physical object. I’d chuck all 12,000+ of mine for ASCII files.

L. Timmel Duchamp

The book as material object speaks to me, always, of its history, both its own particular history—its age, its having been handled and read by a particular person or persons, the marks that have been inscribed in its pages, its itinerary in the world—and its shared history with the other volumes in its print run, representing, as that shared history does, the hours of devotion and labor and the financial investment implicit in the production of any book, beginning but not limited to its author’s. I am as subliminally aware of that history of the physical book as I am of its non-physical history (i.e., its place in the world as a text).

Lawrence Dyer

Apart from all the usual, outstanding things that everyone else will mention too—smell, texture, design and so on—I very much like the shape and weight of books. As someone who has in the past built drystone walls—and whose storytelling grandfather was a house builder—I love fitting books into a bookcase, or stacking them on a shelf or elsewhere. This may seem trivial, but the weight and thickness, compressibility, height, and width of a book are all significant as they relate to other books in the same space: books relate by subject matter but also by their physical characteristics. Taking the idea a stage further, I’ve often thought about a drystone wall made of books—or, rather, a drybook wall. Such a wall would be both a wonderful library and a superb balance of the weight and size of each book in relation to the others.

Carol Emshwiller

I love books as physical objects. I’d pine away without them. My son once said, “It’s such a beautiful sunny day I think I’ll go out and buy a book.” But another time, much later, he said, “What a dreary day. I think I’ll go out and buy a book.” That’s how I feel, too. Every weather is better with a book. I always feel excited when I order a book or go out to buy one. I always think the new book is going to be wonderful—exactly what I’ve always wanted and needed and every now and then it is. And every now and then it’s better than I could have wished for. Reading a good book is about the most exciting thing I do. I try to get myself out to get exercise, but I have to force myself. I’d rather be reading.

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Brian Evenson

I like the tangibility of it, the way in which the pages turn, the quality of the binding and the paper. I love in particular a well-made hardback book that falls open nicely and stays open—something harder and harder to find in the U.S. I like as well the portability of it, that I can take a book anywhere, that I can read it sitting on the couch or walking down the street.

Tim Feeney

Its vulnerability. Paper rips, bindings break. You have to respect a book’s fragility or you’ll damage it. People who seriously value books as objects can be spotted a mile away: they feel the paper in a way that suggests it’s more than merely tactile; they cradle the spine of the book in their hand as if they were holding a baby.

Jeffrey Ford

What I like most about it is that, although its message may change in the reader’s mind, its language and layout never do. With the onset of the Internet and computing, texts are now changeable. The language of a story or essay can be altered from one moment to the next. With the government demanding more and more control over the Internet, I fear that texts critical of it could be changed by it, and who accesses that text can also be known. A book is a subversive object—easily hidden, secretly passed, its language unchanging.

Karen Joy Fowler

Mostly I like the ease with which I can go forwards and backwards in it. When trying to relocate a particular quote I have a good memory not for which page I read it on, but for which quadrant of the page it was on, so I flip back through all the left-hand corners (for example) until I find the left-hand corner I want.

Neil Gaiman

The smell of paper, the way the book feels, the look of it, the heft.

Stephen Gallagher

I’m a sucker for those Edwardian hardbacks with printed cover boards and clear, well-spaced type. These were not disposable objects.

Theodora Goss

A difficult question to answer, because I like a different thing about every book I own. (To the extent one owns books. I suspect that if we asked the books themselves, they would describe a process of circulation, through shelves of dusty bookstores, piles on the floors of graduate student apartments, library carrels.) About Ruskin’s Works in twenty-two volumes: their solid procession of crimson and gilding, so satisfying on the shelf. About Howard’s End, in a torn green cover from the seventies: that I can leave it open on my bedside table, the way you should never do because it cracks the spine, until I’m once again feeling complicated and melancholy. About The Blue Fairy Book: that on the embossed cover, two frogs are talking and a fairy is holding strings that are tied to bees. No story in the book corresponds to that cover. One has to write one’s own.

M. John Harrison

I can take books or leave them as physical objects. A small one is easier to get in your pocket.

Barry Hughart

I was very, very young, being read to by my just-reading older sister, when all of a sudden the letters beneath her moving finger began to make sense. Later I tried the magic all by myself, and discovered (with some exaggeration) that I could read! This revelation was truly momentous, a secret I both gloried in and feared, and a couple of months passed before I got the nerve to share it with anyone. Except, of course, the book. We were in this together. I carried it, slept with it—the Book, the wisest, strongest, best, and most reliable friend I have ever had.

Rhys Hughes

Maybe just the idea of the book is nearly enough. The imaginary books in the Borges’ story “The Library of Babel” still excite me and they are certainly not physical objects.

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Shelley Jackson

That it is a physical object is already likeable and needs no qualification. I like everything that comes with that fact: weight, degrees of stiffness and flexibility, transformations when subjected to water, sun, burrowing insects, knives, glue, hacksaws. I also like the fact that the size of an average book bears a relationship to the size of my hand, and also to the amount of food I would like to see on my plate when hungry. I like books’ propensity for collecting small tokens (a photograph of a naked man asleep on a hotel bed, a phonetic transcription of “Polly Wolly Doodle,” a twenty-dollar bill, a razor blade in a plastic bag, food stains, pressed leaves, pressed insects), and I like the way they close tight and keep their contents secret, but spread themselves whenever I want them to.

Harvey Jacobs

I like everything about books as physical objects, especially that they contain entire worlds. I like the feel of them, sometimes the cover art, the look of type, the paper, etc. ad nauseum. One thing I dislike is books printed on lousy paper or with type that demands a magnifying glass to read.

Stephen Jones

The appearance—you can tell a book by its cover. I sometimes buy them just because I like the dust jacket art. The texture of the paper, the feeling of the binding (and whether it’s stamped or not), and the smell of the ink. Interior illustrations, of course (which is why I try to include them in my own books whenever I can). In short, all the things that make e-books and print-on-demand redundant so far as I am concerned.

Henry Kaiser

Weight. Heft. Tactile qualities. Easy to read.

James Patrick Kelly

I like the texture of paper, especially old paper. I like the way you can run a thumb down a right hand corner and riffle the pages. I like the colors in sewn bindings.

Rick Klaw

I love the heft and feel of a book in my hands. The smell of a used book is a singularly pleasurable experience.

John Klima

I love being able to sit on the couch and stare at the shelves of books. I don’t even pull them off the shelf. Every one of these books has a story (not just the one between the covers) of how it ended up in my care; why I chose to add that book to my collection. I love how solid a well-made book feels in my hands; it means something.

Kathe Koja

The fact that it is a physical object—something that can travel with me, something I can hold.

David Langford

A pleasant heft. A hardback design that lies open without needing special weights, clamps or continuing hand pressure.

Tanith Lee

Everything. Touch, smell, appearance. Content, of course.

Des Lewis

The book as physical object was the container, the thing that gifted what I yearned – so, by association with what it gifted, it became a loved object, by look and smell and feel, and assumed taste. The stitching, the tooled spine, the foxing, the heady waft of predictions of nostalgia in future life…

Nick Mamatas

Honestly, the object itself isn’t so interesting to me, though I like the old “pocket” books and wish contemporary novels would be shorter so I could shove them in my back pocket rather than drag them around in a little red wagon. I also prefer matte to gloss in my hand, but other than that, I would just as soon drink pulp soup as read a thick hardback. Whatever gets the words into my head is fine with me.

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Javier A. Martinez

I enjoy holding the book, turning the pages, interacting physically with the text. I also like the way the pages smell, in new books and in old books. The smell evokes a memory process. Holding the book in your hands also personalized the experience. Have you ever read on-line comics? They’re interesting, but actually holding the comic, bag and boarding it to include it in your collection, seeing them lined all in a row, this is all a source of great satisfaction to me. The same holds for books: having a complete “works of” collection makes me feel good. I don’t think the effect would be the same if I had an e-copy.

Farah Mendlesohn

The book moves at my speed. My computer doesn’t navigate as fast as I can. Weight, comfort, ability to provide pictures, words, and art.

Michael Moorcock

Depends on the book, surely? I greatly enjoy individually designed, well-illustrated, well-made books. I have a nostalgic affection for crummy old paperbacks. Books, shall we say, are like people. You enjoy them for different qualities.

h3. Cheryl Morgan

It is easy to read. I’d happily go for e-books if they were not so inconvenient and painful on the eyes.

Darren Nash

Everything. Not very helpful, I know, but the feel of the jacket, the smell (I always used to smell my books when I was growing up—the smell of adventure and knowledge… ), the portability, just… everything.

Richard Eoin Nash

Its sculptural aspects. It has less to do with the reading experience, which I think can be quite various and more to do with its designed objecthood. A book as a physical object is like a lamp or a pen or a chair, a combination of functionality and aesthetics, generating the same opportunities for displacements as are afforded by any given fetish object. Given that few books are necessary from a functional standpoint, there is a huge amount of space for desire in the acquisition of a book.

Vera Nazarian

A physical book is a multi-sensory time capsule. Not only is it a thing of wood pulp and dyes that can be tested in the laboratory by some future curious connoisseur, but it is a snapshot of a human mindset taken at a certain moment in history and representative of not only one human being, the author, but likely the intended audience.

Ian Nichols

Its sensuality. A book is tangible, and the paper picks up scents, finger marks, stains and dust. It is, in itself, a history, as well as a text.

Lance Olsen

The heft in hand. The way the pages collect to the left, showing me I’m always getting somewhere important.

Milorad Pavić

A supposed similarity to the house. In Amsterdam a friend of mine once showed me an object on the table—something like a small house with a staircase on the façade, door and windows on the first floor. It was made of iron and it was the cover of his new book. I was fascinated.

Justina Robson

The crisp, new pages opening up. Or, if it’s a used book, the old telltale pages opening up, revealing all that print, thumbprints, bits of sandwich and dead bugs etc… I also like hardbacks although I’m too cheap to buy them and I like the old covers on ancient first editions of things which have got really worn with use and age, books that have been around the block a few times.

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Luís Rodrigues

In short? Portable universe.

Mary Doria Russell

I appreciate a well-designed cover. Robin Locke Monda has done the cover art for my novels, and I know for a fact that they’ve attracted a readership that ordinarily avoids science fiction. People do, in fact, judge a book by its cover, and I think Paul Di Filippo was right when he said a few years ago that science fiction would be more respected as a genre if the books had been packaged like generic groceries used to be: in a plain white wrapper with plain black print.

Lucius Shepard

I’m not all that concerned with books as objects. Most books I buy I end up spilling stuff on, scribbling notes in them, etc. I particularly don’t like having copies of my own books about. I generally chuck them in a closet and only dig them out if somebody wants a copy. Many times, when I get author’s copies, I don’t even open the box.

Delia Sherman

I like the way it feels in my hands. I like the weight of it, whether it’s the feather weight of a mass market paperback, or the solid heft of a hard-bound tome. I like the texture of cloth covers, the slickness of dust jackets and shiny paper covers. Leather, of course, is best of all, although I can remember a silk-bound volume of Christina Rossetti’s poems that I loved to stroke. Carefully, of course.

Mike Simanoff

I like how books accumulate their own history. They also reflect the virtuosic decay of the world. The lingo of the antiquarian and used book trade is a lexicon of decadence: brittle, chipped, cracked, damaged, doctored, dog-eared, foxing, mildew, rubbed, warping, worming.

Brian Stableford

It’s a masterpiece of design: a great deal of information, perfectly ordered and contained.

Peter Straub

I like the ease of access afforded by a book, also its well-nigh effortless transportability.

Anna Tambour

Its noble qualities: friendliness, stoicism, accessibility at all hours (with no need to be humored and no fits of indisposition), and its dignified vulnerability.

Jeffrey Thomas

One might transport a laptop and read from that, but there is still something more transportable about a book; it can be read in the tub, on the train… but more than that, a book becomes an extension of the reader in a way that a computer does not. A paperback curves to the hands that cup it. A hardback rests its covers upon the thighs. Books conform to our bodies as our minds mold to their words. It’s an almost sensual, surely corporeal, intimacy.

Scott Thomas

I like a book’s portability, its weight and how it is a container of goodies much as a box of chocolates is. The book as a whole functions as an artwork.

William Thompson

It’s physicality as history. My greatest interest in the book as object is its manner of binding, paper quality, and presentation of the text, especially if illustrative matter is included (sadly, not often in today’s world), and their relationship to the history of book binding and publishing. Unfortunately, little today of note, as most books are printed and bound in the cheapest manner possible, with little prospect either for longevity or quality or originality of presentation. Unfortunately, the history of publication has been one of steady degradation, reaching its nadir within our own lifetimes.

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Jeff Topham

To me, a book exists simultaneously as both form and content. In other words, a book is not simply the means used to convey the story, but it is also a physical artifact in its own right. To lavish attention on the form itself (the quality of paper, the choice of font, the method of binding, the choice of cover art) is by implication to treat the story within as worthy of both love and respect.

Lisa Tuttle

What’s not to like? Shape, size, portability, accessibility, smell, texture, leather or cloth bindings, paper pages—all that before you even get to the content!

Gordon Van Gelder

The former CEO at St. Martin’s, Tom McCormack, loved the smell of old books. I was taken aback in a meeting when I brought out a 1950s book from my father’s library and Tom cracked open the book, stuck his nose deep in the binding, and took a big whiff. Not sure what my own favorite part of a book is—probably the physical feel.

Alan Wall

Its self-containment. Its lack of clamour, however extraordinary the contents. Over-designed and flashy books soon irritate. They forget that advertising can make an impact but a short-lived one; a book stays with you till either you or it goes under. Good books fit Pound’s definition of poetry: news that stays news. I pick two up at random from my desk. One is by Borges: Doctor Brodie’s Report. Published by Allen Lane in 1974. Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in collaboration with the author. A good, sound copy printed on quality paper. The other is Wordsworth’s Prelude. The age-old edition of Selincourt, published by Oxford University Press. This edition is from 1949. It’s a workhorse of a book, designed to withstand the indelicate activities of students. Cost me four pounds. It’s a smallish octavo which fits into the pocket of my cagoule, where it often finds itself. Doesn’t complain. Nothing fancy about it. No airs and graces. It’s a serious book and it knows it. Good books are properly designed for their purpose: reading, which is a solitary activity. Nobody can strut their stuff and read at the same time, thank God. That’s surely part of the immense irritation Hamlet feels at having to talk to Polonius—‘these tedious old fools’—the old fraud interrupts his reading.

Michael Walsh

Texture. I’m a sucker for the material produced by Roy Squires.

Liz Williams

Leather. Gilt. Ancient scents—like smoke and apples and musk. Not applied to the modern paperback, obviously.

Neil Williamson

Obviously the feel: the variety of textures of the paper—from smooth, fine, white paper to rough, yellowy pulp; the embossed lettering on the glossy covers. The smell too, I suppose, fresh and woody and chemical.

Richard Winters

I have always been fascinated by the indivisible nature of the physical book and the language or images that it is conveying. Sometimes the blend is plain and simple, sometimes complex, but to me the book can be as beautiful as any other object made by our species.

Paul Witcover

I can hit the cat with one if I have to. And the stacks they make on the floor and tables of my tiny apartment bring back the childhood joys of building castles with blocks… and knocking them over.

Gene Wolfe

It’s the paper I like most—my favorite component, so to speak. I like good paper, moderately heavy, moderately white, and acid-free. Books can be rebound; but when the paper goes, the book is dust. I have Wheeler’s Familiar Allusions, published in 1882. I love this old book, and would preserve it if I could. The paper breaks almost at a touch.

Zoran Živković

The erotic fact that I can take it with me to the bed.