The Folio Society unveils 2026 spring collection
Lots of SF/F titles to look forward to
After a couple of teases in the last week, The Folio Society unveiled its upcoming Spring Collection on its social media this morning, and this batch includes a great lineup of science fiction and fantasy titles.
For decades, the publisher has been releasing special editions of classic books, usually with additional artwork, forewords/introductions/essays, and nice slipcases, and after a concerted push into science fiction and fantasy literature starting in 2015, I've found that they make for excellent additions to one's bookshelves.
This latest batch has me thinking that I'm going to need to find some room for a couple of additional volumes. Here's what will be included:
- The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Iliad by Homer
- Conrad’s Fate by Diana Wynne Jones
- Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
- Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
- Masters of the Air by Donald L. Miller
- Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore
- The Martian by Andy Weir
Of those, The Last Unicorn, Station Eleven, Perdido Street Station, and The Martian look the most promising. I'm also happy to see that they're doing Masters of the Air, which looks like it'll be a good followup to their edition of Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers. The Illiad also comes right in time for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey later this summer. It's a book that the publisher has released numerous times before, and last year, it was published alongside The Odyssey as a limited edition.
Another returning book is Perdido Street Station, which came out last year as another of its special, limited editions. It came with a special case at the hefty price of $600. This'll be its regular "core" edition, and eyeballing the product pictures, it'll have a different cover (and should come at a lower price point.)
The Martian comes with a familiar name attached to it: artist Dániel Taylor, who illustrated Folio Society's editions of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. I was really impressed with the work that he did for those books, and I'll be really interested to see what he draws up for this book.
Andrew Liptak
This is actually the second special edition of Weir's novel: late last year, Penguin Random House announced that it was releasing a deluxe edition of the book (it'll be released in May), which featured its own slipcase and sprayed edges. I'm a bit skeptical of what that will look like: I've been finding that most of the "deluxe" editions are essentially repackaged trade editions, and I've little doubt that while The Folio Society's version will cost more, it'll be a much better volume.
The publisher hasn't released prices, but has said that they will go on sale on March 3rd.