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Justina Robson

Design-wise I liked House of Leaves and I liked the cover of my last book a lot, Natural History. The size and shape of the PS Publishing quartets is nice and I particularly like the feel of the silky finish they do on recent paperback covers here in the UK, I don’t know what it’s called. I think that the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror has had very nice collectible cover art that does justice to the contents. I recently got the Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman, a very minimalist hardcover with a plain jacket and I thought it looked and felt very “authentic,” like they didn’t care if you liked them or not. I liked that.

Luís Rodrigues

I love hand-made books. For example, Tim Powers’ limited edition of Where They Are Hid is gorgeous… though expensive. In regards to design, City of Saints and Madmen is exceptionally well done. John Coulthart’s work for Savoy Books and, more recently, The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases is nothing short of impressive. And I’m sadly unable to remember the title right now, but one of the best covers I saw made the book appear uncannily like a box of Cuban cigars.

Mary Doria Russell

A recent biography of Louis Sockalexis was wonderfully designed. Sockalexis was a Penobscot Indian—the first Native American to play professional baseball. (He was the inspiration for the name of the Cleveland Indians, so the legend goes.) The title of the book was perfect: Indian Summer, and the old photo of Sockalexis in his uniform is printed in a lovely burnt orange, like autumn leaves. Don’t get better than that…

Lucius Shepard

I like Pete Crowther’s stuff from PS Publishing and though I’ve only seen two of Nightshades books, they looked quite fine.

Delia Sherman

I like the Small Beer Press books, especially The Mount and Stranger Things Happen. The covers are evocative, and they don’t fall off after a couple of readings.

Mike Simanoff

Many of the highly-priced independent press editions are very high quality books. Night Shade’s new William Hope Hodgson title, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ and Other Nautical Adventures, is a perfect example. Its ethereal cover is aesthetically pleasing, and the book itself is sturdy.

Brian Stableford

The loveliest one I received recently is Savoy’s new edition of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus.

Peter Straub

The Mooring Of Starting Out, John Ashbery, Ecco Press; Collected Works, Lorine Niedecker, University of California Press; The Complete Poems Of Kenneth Rexroth, ed. Sam Hamill & Bradford Morrow, Copper Canyon Press.

Anna Tambour

Insect Lives: Stories of Mystery and Romance from a Hidden World, edited by Erich Hoyt and Ted Schultz, John Wiley & Sons, 1999… Last year we had to pack a car with our belongings to flee with, in case the bushfires took our house. This was the first book I packed, and I could only take so many. This hardback has everything. It has the attention to detail and to appropriate aesthetics that every collection of fiction should. Its arrangement is logical, table of contents visually distinctive and appropriate. Its index works. As a read, it is the perfect combination of ripping yarns, beautiful artwork (wisely sparse, and all black and white), and hilarity. A fine judgment has gone into the choice of fonts and styles of type, as well as white space on the page.

Jeffrey Thomas

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, with its intricate use of fonts, interior color, artwork, daring page composition. City of Saints and Madmen for its use of a story directly on the front and back covers, encoded story, copious footnotes, and other imaginative treats.

Scott Thomas

Recent books? I’d say that the Ministry of Whimsy’s Leviathan 3 has an overall sensibility that is very appealing. The design evokes a mood that seems right for the content, and makes for a fine package. The Monkey’s Paw and Other Tales of Mystery and the Macabre, from Academy of Chicago Publishers, has a lovely autumnal cover by French artist Victor Prouve that sets the perfect tone for a collection of old fashioned stories. A very dignified treatment, design-wise. Alexander Theroux’s The Strange Case of Edward Gorey is a delight. A fine example of a book in which the packaging and the content have a certain (consistent) harmonious something that just clicks.