2026 - New Books I Am Excited About

This page is where I track all the 2026 upcoming titles that most interest me and that I hope to read. The list is alphabetized for easy lookup. I also keep a list organized buy release date (also including publisher name, ISBN, price, etc.) to help out with planning and book buying. To view that list you simply have to register for the site here. It's free to join!

I focus mainly on books about publishing, authors, printing, book selling, bookstores, book collecting, book design, bibliophilia, book history, etc. Each book I read is a contender for the annual Books About Books Awards. If you would like to see past lists of the books about books I tracked last year, you can find them here: 2025, 2024.

Do you know of a book related book that I have missed? If so, please drop me a line info [at] booksaboutbooks.com and I’ll check it out to see if I’d like to add it to my to-be-read pile. Thanks!

100 Books to Live By: Literary Remedies for Any Occasion by Joseph Piercy
A Compass On the Navigable Sea: 100 Years of World Literature by Daniel Simon (Editor)
Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery: The Story of Crime Fiction by Martin Edwards and Lucy Rowland
American Sophistication: How the Casual Became Cool by Ross Posnock
An Archive by Mathieu Lindon
The Art of the Book: 75 Years of Thames & Hudson by Anna Nyburg
The Author of Mary Poppins: The Unknown Story of P L Travers by Elisabeth Galvin
Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson
Between Novel and Network: Technology and Literary Form in Fiction and Fanfiction by Suzanne R. Black
Big American Writer : The Bilingual Jack Kerouac by Jean-Christophe Cloutier
Book Lovers' New England: A Guide to Literary Landmarks by Sheila Moeschen
The Book: 101 Definitions by Amaranth Borsuk
Bookbindings: An Illustrated History by David Pearson
Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives by Lucy Mangan
The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century by Andrew Pettegree
The Bookshop Woman: My Year Transforming Lives–One Book at a Time by Nanako Hanada
Christmas Mysteries at The Mysterious Bookshop by Otto Penzler (Editor)
City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore by Gioia Woods
Cookbooking: A Fan's Guide by Debbie Berne
Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty
Critical Masses: The Invention of Close Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jesse Cordes Selbin
Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe by Emily Ogden
Digital Inc.: From Print to E-Book-Inside the Transformation of the Book Industry by Richard Curtis
The Double Life of Books: Making and Re-Making the Reader by Peter D McDonald
Eleven Days: The Fascinating True Account of Agatha Christie's Mysterious Disappearance by Laura Thompson
En Route: A Journey Through France in the Company of Great Writers by Peter Fiennes
"Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books" by Nicholas Royle
Folger Shakespeare Library: Renewal and Revitalization by Stephen Kieran and Huwayda Fakhry
The Great Age of Storytelling: The Glory Days of Adventurers and Rogues, Time Travelers, and Great Detectives by Michael Dirda
"A History of Booksellers and the Bookshop" by Jean-Yves Mollier
Hope in the Library: How Libraries Can Help Shape Our Future with Artificial Intelligence by Jr., Michael J. Paulus
Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad by Jeff Jarvis
Houdini's Library: Inside the Spellbinding Collections of the Great Illusionist by Eric Colleary
Humanistic Judgment: Ten Experiments in Reading by Benjamin Barasch, David Bromwich, Bryan Garsten
In Contagion's Wake: Black Writers and the Development of Modern Outbreak Narratives by Kelly L. Bezio
In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship by Ann Blair
The Infinite Loop: Archives and Time Travel in the Popular Imagination by Lynne M. Thomas and Katy Rawdon
Into the Badlands: America and its Crime Writers, 2nd ed. by John Williams
Jack Rittenhouse: A Western Literary Life by David R. Farmer
Jean Toomer: Writer for a New America by George Hutchinson
Lady C: The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Guy Cuthbertson
The Last Amateur: Jonathan Swift, Edward Said, and the Profession of Literature by Helen Deutsch
Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing by Richard Stursberg
A Librarian's War: The Man Who Fought World War II with Books and Brought the Joy of Reading to Millions by Molly Guptill Manning
The Lightning-Bug and the Lightning: Debunking the Myths of Mark Twain, in His Own Words by Mark Dawidziak
"A Life Among Books: The Art of Collecting and Preserving the Printed Past" by Andrew Michael Norris
Magic on Paper: Steidl Book Culture by Dominika Hasse
The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom by Harold Bloom
Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction by Laura B. McGrath
Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King by Caroline Bicks
The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society by James Marriott
The Neverending Book by Naoki Matayoshi
Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built by Gayle Feldman
On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat
Paper Intimacies in the Early Modern Lyric by Dianne Mitchell
"Print Technologies and the Emergence of American Literary Cultures" by Oliver Scheiding
Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters by Naomi S. Baron
Reading Matters: A History for the Digital Age by Joel Halldorf
Reading Pictures: A History of Illustration by D. B. Dowd
Receipts from the Bookshop: A Bookseller's Year in an English Seaside Town by Katie Clapham
"Return of the Bookseller Diarist" by Shaun Bythell
The Second Printing Revolution: Invention of Mass Media by Jeremy M. Norman
Shut Up and Read: A Memoir from Harriett’s Bookshop by Jeannine A. Cook
The Story of Printmaking: A Global History of Art by Holly Black
Storyteller : The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by Leo Damrosch
The Storytellers: Reading the Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Short Fiction by Michael Gorra
Too Good to Waste: Recycling Paper in the Eighteenth Century by Amélie Junqua & Geoffrey Day
Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Jo Walton, Ada Palmer
Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography by Joshua Kendall
Tsundoku: The Japanese Art of Collecting Books by Taiki Raito Pym
Unread: A Memoir of Learning (and Loving) to Read on TikTok by Oliver James
We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature by Aarthi Vadde
What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia
When Books Go Bad: Tales of Literary Feuds, Publishing Errors and Withering Reviews by Alex Johnson
A World of Bookish Places: Travel Inspiration for Book Lovers by DK Travel
The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love by Katie da Cunha Lewin
Writing for Dark Times: A Literary History of Human Rights by Hadji Bakara