Easton Press Gift Guide: How to Choose a Leather-Bound Classic for the Reader You Love

Real leather, gold page edges, a ribbon sewn in. Here is how to pick an Easton Press book for the reader you have in mind, and how to spot a worn copy before you pay for it.

By Pam Fournier, vintage bookseller and owner of Reading Vintage

Easton Press has been making some of the most giftable books in America since February 1975. Genuine leather, gold stamping on the spine, gold on the page edges, a satin ribbon to hold your place. Hand one to a reader and they know in about two seconds that you thought about them.

So here is the plain answer to the question behind most of the searching. Buy by the reader, not by the price tag, and buy from photos of the actual book. An Easton Press edition is a fine reprint of a classic, not a first edition. What you are giving is a beautiful object to read and keep, not an investment. Once you accept that, the choosing gets easy, because you are no longer hunting for the rarest copy. You are hunting for the right story.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Easton Press editions are fine reprints. Buy them for the reading and for the object, never as a financial investment.
2. Match the book to the person's taste first. Leather does not rescue a story they will never open.
3. Check the spine in the photos. Raised bands, crisp gold lettering, and a ribbon marker are the three quick tells.
4. Thirty to one hundred dollars is a normal range for a used Easton Press classic. Title and condition set the price, not age alone.
5. Buy the copy you can see. A listing with no photos of the actual book is a gamble.

What makes an Easton Press book different?

Easton Press started as the fine books division of MBI, and its first series was The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written. The company is based in Norwalk, Connecticut. Its editions are built the old way: genuine leather binding, 22 karat gold stamping on the cover and across the raised spine bands, acid neutral paper made to last for generations, pages sewn in signatures instead of glued, gold on the page edges, moiré fabric endpapers, and a satin ribbon marker.

That list is why the book feels the way it does in your hands, and it is also why these volumes turn up at estate sales forty years later with the pages still tight and the spine still square.

Two honest notes before you shop. First, most Easton Press editions are reprints of classics, which is exactly why a used copy is affordable. Second, not every volume carries every feature. Easton's science fiction line, for example, uses different endpapers. So read the photos instead of assuming, and ask the seller if a detail matters to you.

How do you match the book to the reader?

This is the part that decides whether the gift lands. A leather binding is the wrapping. The title is the gift. Here is how I sort the shelf when someone tells me who they are shopping for.

For the reader who wants to be scared

Edgar Allan Poe is the safest bet in the whole store, because almost everyone who reads has a Poe phase and almost nobody outgrows it. Tales of Mystery & Imagination is the 1975 Easton Press collection, bound in leather with gold on the spine. Hand it to a teenager and you have made a reader for life. Hand it to a grown adult in October and you have made their whole month.

Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe, $45.

For the reader who likes salt air and a long voyage

Jack London and Joseph Conrad wrote the two books I would give to anyone who claims they do not like classics. The Sea Wolf is a brutal, fast little novel about a literary critic who gets pulled out of the bay and dropped onto a seal hunting ship. Lord Jim is the slower, sadder one about a man who spends a whole life trying to live down one moment of cowardice. Both are in leather, both are illustrated, and both hold up when you read them as an adult.

The Sea Wolf by Jack London, $34.99. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, $38.

For the reader who likes to laugh and argue

This is the group most gift buyers forget, and it is the one that gets the best reaction on Christmas morning. Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer is a 1773 comedy about a young man who is so shy with well brought up women that he mistakes a private house for an inn and treats his future mother in law like a barmaid. Molière's Tartuffe is a 1664 attack on a religious fraud that still lands. And Tristram Shandy is the strangest, funniest book of the eighteenth century, a novel that keeps interrupting itself on purpose.

If they like the old comedies, Aristophanes is the grandfather of the whole shelf. The Birds and The Frogs in the 1979 Easton Press edition has sold out of the shop, but one buyer left a five star review on Etsy on October 24 and I have not stopped smiling at it:

It’s beautiful and funny if you’re more than a thousand years old 😉

Aristophanes wrote those two plays in the fifth century BC and they still get a laugh out of a modern reader, which is exactly the point I keep making about comedy in leather. It does not go stale.

She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith, $49.99. Tartuffe and The Would Be Gentleman by Molière, $49. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, $55.

For the reader who reads plays and poetry out loud

Some people do not want a novel. They want something they can finish in an evening and then talk about at breakfast. The Chekhov volume holds The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters, two plays about families who cannot manage to change in time. Sophocles gives you Oedipus the King, which is still the tightest plot ever built. And Robert Browning is the poet for people who think they do not like poetry, because his poems are arguments and confessions and murders rather than descriptions of flowers.

Two Plays: The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, $50. Oedipus the King by Sophocles, $59. The Poems of Robert Browning, $34.99.

For the reader who thinks about big ideas and history

This is the shelf for the person who reads the introduction and the footnotes, the one who wants to argue about the Enlightenment over dinner. The Analects of Confucius is the most giftable book of the group, because it is short, it is portable wisdom, and it is illustrated with paintings by Tseng Yu Ho in this printing. Rousseau's Confessions invented the modern memoir. Galileo Galilei by Ludovico Geymonat is the science history pick for someone who already has the novels. The Way of All Flesh is Samuel Butler's quiet, savage novel about breaking free of a family. And Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is the one I would hand to a serious history reader, because it changed the country it was published into and it is still readable in a week.

Analects of Confucius, $99. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, $68. Galileo Galilei by Ludovico Geymonat, $55. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler, $99. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, $90.

For the reader who wants short pieces at bedtime

Not everyone reads one book straight through at night, and the short story people are the easiest to shop for once you notice them. The Short Stories of Charles Dickens is the Dickens for someone who has already done the novels. The Tales of Guy de Maupassant is the collection I recommend to anyone who says they want something they can finish in one sitting. Add the Dickens and the Maupassant to the same shelf and you have handed over about sixty evenings.

The Short Stories of Charles Dickens, $45. The Tales of Guy de Maupassant, $44.99.

For the reader who wants a novel to sink into

The long, serious ones, for the person who reads the way other people garden. Madame Bovary is the most famous of the group and the most giftable, because everyone has heard of it and almost nobody has read it in a beautiful edition. The Red and the Black is the one for a reader who likes ambition and trouble. The Return of the Native has Thomas Hardy's wood engravings and the darkest moors in English fiction. The Mill on the Floss is the one to give a sibling.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, $75. The Red and the Black by Stendhal, $34.99. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, $45. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, $49.99.

For the gift with the smallest budget and the biggest shelf

One more, because not every gift budget runs to a hundred dollars. Anton Chekhov Greatest Plays, illustrated by Elisaveta Fen, is a Franklin Library edition rather than an Easton Press, so read the listing photos closely. Same era, same idea, different publisher. At $28 it is the best way to put real leather and gold on a young reader's shelf without spending like a collector.

Anton Chekhov Greatest Plays, Franklin Library, $28.

And for the person whose name is on a bookplate

The American Leonardo is the odd one out and my favorite to explain. It is Carleton Mabee's 1943 biography of Samuel Morse, the painter who invented the telegraph, and it won the 1944 Pulitzer Prize for biography. That makes it the gift for the person who likes inventors, or American history, or both. It is not a novel, which is exactly why it works, because the reader on your list probably already has the novels.

The American Leonardo: The Life of Samuel Morse by Carleton Mabee, $49.99.

How can you tell a good Easton Press copy from a worn one?

You have five things to look at, and you can do all of them from a good set of photos.

The gold on the spine. Gold stamping wears first at the raised bands and the corners, because that is where hands go. A little rubbing is normal on a forty year old book and it does not stop anyone reading. Gold that has gone silver and dull across the whole title means the book was handled hard or stored in sunlight.

The hinge. Open the cover in your mind and ask about the hinge, the fold where the board meets the spine. If the listing shows a split there, the book will still read but it will not survive another twenty years of opening. Ask the seller directly if the hinge is sound.

The page edges. Gold on the edges should still catch light in a photo taken at an angle. Scratches and dull patches are cosmetic. Water staining along the top edge is not, so look for a tide line.

The ribbon. The satin ribbon marker is the first thing that goes missing and the easiest thing to check. It is not a deal breaker, but a book that still has its ribbon was usually read carefully.

The smell, if you are in person. Old paper and leather have a smell. A damp basement has a different one, and that one does not come out.

One more thing, and this is the one that saves people money. Read the condition notes the way you would read a recipe, all the way to the end, and look at the photos of the actual book rather than a stock image. A seller who photographs the worn spot is telling you the truth. That is the seller you want.

What should an Easton Press book cost?

Our copies run from $28 to $99. The range is set by the title and the condition, not by how old the book is. A famous novel in good shape lands in the middle. A collection of essays or plays costs less, because fewer people are shopping for it. A big, illustrated volume with a lot of gold and a hundred pages of color work sits at the top.

What I would tell you as a buyer is this. Pay for the title you actually want, then pay a little more for the copy in better shape. Saving eight dollars on a book with a cracked hinge is not a saving. And if you see the exact edition someone asked for, do not think about it for a week. Vintage does not restock neatly. There is no second copy in the back room.

How do you wrap and ship a leather book?

Skip the tape. Tape and leather do not belong in the same sentence, and ribbon adhesive will lift the finish right off a cover. Wrap the book in kraft paper and tie it with cotton twine, which is what it wants anyway. If you are mailing it, tell the seller you want it boxed rather than bagged, and keep it out of a hot car on the way to the post office, because heat is what warps a binding.

Book orders of $35 or more ship free from my shop by Media Mail, and I pack every one myself. If you want the full breakdown of how shipping works, including when it is free, the shipping guide is here.

Is an Easton Press book the right gift for everyone?

No, and I would rather tell you that than sell you one. Skip it if the person reads on a phone, if they travel with a paperback stuffed in a bag, or if they write in the margins with a pen and want to keep doing it. Leather and gold are for the reader who likes the object as much as the story, the one who keeps a book on the table after they finish it.

For everybody else, a good used paperback is the better gift, and I will happily point you at one. The right book in the wrong binding beats the wrong book in leather every single time.

Which Easton Press books are in the shop right now?

Everything I mentioned above is on the Easton Press leather-bound shelf in my shop, and each listing has photos of the actual book, the print year, and honest condition notes including the parts that do not flatter it. The shelf changes as books sell, so if you are shopping for a specific title, look now rather than in December.

Give someone an Easton Press book and you are handing them an object that was built to outlast both of you. That is a strange and lovely thing to be able to give a person for forty dollars.

Keep Learning

• What Are the Best Vintage Books to Read Aloud With Family Over the Holidays? The titles that work out loud, and the ones that do not.
• How Do I Find a Vintage Horror Paperback I Only Remember by the Cover? For the Poe reader who wants to track down the scary book from their childhood.
• What Does It Cost to Ship a Vintage Book in the US, and When Is Shipping Free? What you will pay, and how to keep a heavy book from arriving damaged.

About the Author

Pam Fournier is a vintage bookseller and the owner of Reading Vintage in Midland, Michigan, where she lists, photographs, packs, and ships every item herself. She has been out hunting sales for fifteen years, five of them as co-owner of an estate sale company, and leather-bound classics are the category she keeps for herself.

Reading Vintage has earned over 500 reviews across Shopify and Etsy since 2016.