Fine Books’ 10 Best Books About Books 2025

Throughout the year we have enjoyed suggesting the best new books about the many and varied facets of the book world that have been published each month. Here are our 10 favorites, the first five chosen by our print magazine editor Allison Meier, the second five by online editor Alex Johnson.

Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter by Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith (The MIT Press)

I really loved how this book was not just informative about the history of a little-known area of ephemera, but also how it included instructions to try out letterlocking yourself! 

Richard Sharpe Shaver: Some Stones Are Ancient Books (The Further Reading Library)

I appreciate publications that delve into obscure topics thoughtfully and are well designed, so the Further Reading Library releases are right up my alley. I had to get a copy of the Richard Sharpe Shaver book because I've long been fascinated with how the sci-fi writer believed that rocks were, in fact, books; you just had to look closely to read them. 

Booksellers Reflect on Self-Publishing (Half Letter Press)

This is an engaging compact publication with insights from people in the zine, artist book, and other DIY worlds on why making and sharing your own work is important. As a zine maker myself, I found it interesting to hear from those on the selling side of distributing this offbeat literature.  

The Harlem Book of the Dead (Primary Information)

I have been wanting to track down a copy of this 1978 book of James Van Der Zee's funerary photographs, so I was thrilled to spot this new release of it at the New York Art Book Fair. The images are incredibly moving, sensitively showing the care of the dead as part of life.

Magic Art (Fulgur Press)

A number of Fulgur Press's exquisite esoteric books are on my shelves, and I was thrilled to add this new English translation of André Breton's 1957 L’Art magique. Especially cool is the bibliography that shows what the Surrealist founder had in his personal library.

Pen Names by Kirsty McHugh and Ian Scott (Bodleian Libraries)
 
A perfect stocking filler which accompanied the National Library of Scotland's exhibition and offers the intriguing stories behind why the likes of Currer Bell chose varying levels of anonymity.

V is for Venom: Agatha Christie's Chemicals of Death by Kathryn Harkup (Bloomsbury)

A useful vade mecum by an expert chemist for all those with a fondness for crime fiction, especially of the Christie variety.

A History of England in 25 Poems by Catherine Clarke (Allen Lane)

Historian Clarke's chronicle of how people have told their country's history through poetry uses an intriguing mix of the well-known and the less familiar, as well as a wide mix of authors. A big hit in the UK, it deserves a wider audience beyond the White Cliffs of Dover.

The Bookseller of Hay: The Life and Times of Richard Booth by James Hanning (Corsair)

Booth was one of the key figures in the world of secondhand bookselling in the 20th century, as well as one of the most eccentric. This is a good effort at producing a rounded biographical picture of what motivated him and what he achieved.

Possessed: A Lost Novel of the Occult Rosalie and Edward Synton (British Library)

The British Library has done an astonishing job in reuniting semi-lost fiction with a new generation of readers via its Tales of the Weird series. Possessed is one of the most recent. First published in 1927 by a husband-and-wife writing duo, it had virtually disappeared before being recovered by editor Johnny Mains who provides a useful introduction.