Neuromancer is getting a special edition
Another special(?) edition for your shelf
Here's another classic novel that's getting the "sprayed edges" treatment: William Gibson's Neuromancer. People Magazine (of all places) carried the announcement, pointing out that Ace Books will be releasing the edition in September, with new a new cover and sprayed edges art by Tavis Coburn.
Presumably, this comes in conjunction with (or anticipating) the release of the upcoming adaptation from AppleTV. The company hasn't announced a release date yet, but filming was underway last year and everything I've seen has hinted at a late 2026 release.
Andrew Liptak
It also comes after a couple of other special edition releases for the novel after the 40th anniversary of its publication in 1984: The Folio Society released a special, limited edition in 2024 and a "core" edition last year, while UK publisher Gollancz released its own special edition as well.
What's interesting about this particular edition is that unlike every other sprayed edition that's hit shelves in the last couple of years, this is a trade paperback, which I don't think that I've seen yet. To me, this suggests that we're seeing a real saturation with these types of special editions, and it brings me around to point to a piece I wrote last year about this when Penguin Random House announced a special deluxe edition of Andy Weir's The Martian: "if it's anything like the Red Rising edition I got my hands on, it's not likely going to be anywhere near the same class of books that you see from those specialty publishers [like Subterranean Press or Folio Society.) At what point do these types of books drop the "special"?
As it happens, the first book I finished this year was Neuromancer, and the copy that I have is the Gollancz edition. It's a beautiful one: it has the usual sprayed edges (bright orange) and ribbon, but the cover art is gorgeous, the interior type is really well done, the paper is a heavy paper stock, and it has a ton of full-page and accent illustrations. This wasn't a book that was thrown together as an afterthought, and it looks really good on a shelf.
This makes me think that we've really hit a point where we've crossed over from publishers have recognized that fans will pay a bit more for higher-end editions to "let's make the regular editions higher end" and adjust the price point accordingly. The current Neuromancer trade paperback has an MSRP of $20, while this new edition jumps up to $22. That doesn't seem like a lot, but that's a 10% increase, and it's far more than the current inflation rate (2.7%).
It's a small thing, but it feels representative of a whole bunch of bigger things in play at the moment: book prices have gone up dramatically in the last couple of years, and we've started to see the cheapest book form, the mass market paperback, fall out of usage, leaving buyers with the more expensive hardcovers and trade paperbacks as their options. If sprayed editions are a means to inflate a book's price under the guise of being special, limited, or deluxe, then it follows that if those features become common across regular editions, we'll see those prices generally creep up as well.
I'm not sure that the extra bit of ink and updated cover art is really worth it.