Dave Eggers

But books...

so far have resisted the digitization.

We haven't had the pirating that other industries do.

People are still holding the American hardcover market up, which is really lucky.

We're the only country in the world that still prints the number of hardcovers that we do.

You go to Europe and it's quite rare to see hardcover books, which is really too bad.

So I collect old books, I collect old Bibles in particular.

I'll buy a book just for the spine if I see something really unusual.

Anytime I see any kind of really clever book craft, you know, or like a parallelogram shaped book or a book with a Z-shaped spine or anything that took handwork, which really means that somebody by hand is doing that, I always buy these things and then we'll bring them into McSweeney's and the art director, whose name is Sun Ra, Thompson,

We'll look at it together and see how we could apply it to something with McSweeney's.

And then usually these things, they might percolate for a year or two.

And then finally we find the right format.

We did one recently with like woven fabric as the cover, but it's done by machines, but it looks like it's hand done.

But anything you want to do, they can do.

Our Icelandic printer had, when I met them, they had just printed a limited edition of books with shark skin, like actual sharks that had washed up on the shores of Iceland.

Amazing.

They wrapped them around hardcovers.

They smell terrible, but you can do it.

It was Jonathan Lethem called This Shape We're In.

And he was a very well-established novelist at that point, but it was a weird book that he gave to us because he was always supporting us.