Fantastic Metropolis

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Jack Dann

As a contemporary example, I think the Folio Society in London makes very nice books. Also small press publishers such as Arkham House, Easton Press, Ziesing, Lord John Press, Shadowlands Press, and especially Donald M. Grant.

Ellen Datlow

Coraline by Neil Gaiman with illustrations by Dave McKean. I love smaller than standard-sized hardcover books. There is something very neat about them. They fit into your hand like a paperback but with more heft, e.g. The Lemony Snicket series and the small press collection of Mrs. Moleworth’s Collected Ghost Stories I picked up at a recent convention. The outside of the book looks and feels wonderful—robin’s egg blue cloth with gold stamping and a lovely-eerie illustration on the cover. Unfortunately, the interior is less interesting but still…

Alan DeNiro

The paperback of Dictionary of the Khazars is a neat little book. Hmm, this is a difficult question to answer because a “successful” book design doesn’t necessarily draw attention to itself. It can help a reader [achieve] greater focus on the work at hand—which is not a gimme with a crappily designed book. On the other end of the spectrum are the handmade, letter press, more overtly artistic designs for books. There are a lot of these folks in the Twin Cities, as well as the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts, so it’s always incredible to see their sundry, nearly indescribable, wares.

Cory Doctorow

Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen—I love the cover stock and the illustration.

Brian Evenson

McSweeney’s recent Stephen Dixon book is interesting from a design perspective, as is their Neal Pollack book. I also have a series of old pulpy Georges Simenon books I like because they’re small enough to fit comfortable in the hand but the print isn’t too small, and the covers are black white and red, with each cover containing an object and its mirror image. They’re very simple but very appealing. Coffee House and Black Square both do consistently well designed and beautiful books (Coffee House more in the last few years than before). I also very much like books like City of Saints in which the confines of the book are played with, in which the story spills out onto the cover and into the author’s note.

Tim Feeney

Well, besides City of Saints and Madmen... A few publishers have recently put out small (7” X 4 1/2” or so) hardcovers—Alessandro Boffa’s You’re An Animal, Visskovitz! (Knopf), Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake (also Knopf), Peter Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney (Bloomsbury)—that are oddly satisfying to hold. They’re small enough to appeal to people’s love of miniaturization, but big enough to seem legitimate, less gimmicky. They’re fun, and simple and inexpensive. On the other end of the spectrum are designed-to-be-collectable books like Easton Press editions, which have leather covers and heavy paper and gold foil on the pages and are often signed by the authors and printed in limited numbers and are obviously excellent examples of the book-designer’s art; and for all this wind up embarrassingly artificial and cheesy.

Jeffrey Ford

The boxed edition of Issac Babel’s short fiction, recent editions of Borges’ collected non-fiction, poetry and fiction, plenty of children’s books, and City of Saints and Madmen.

Karen Joy Fowler

I’ve recently received the design pages from my own forthcoming novel and have been admiring them a bunch. Until this I paid shockingly little attention to matters of typeface and chapter headings and the like. My aesthetic experience has been limited primarily to the cover. I thought Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress had a very beautiful cover, and also Margot Livesey’s Eva Moves the Furniture.

Neil Gaiman

Persopolis.

Stephen Gallagher

The Annotated Lost World, edited by Pilot and Rodin and published by The Wessex Press, Indianapolis. A perfect meshing of content, design, and materials.