Lacoste has borrowed a page from real printed books, and gone one better, with this engaging online pop-up book dedicated to its founder Rene Lacoste. The six-chapter story is set to a lively ragtime tune and sound effects. Clicking on a chapter prompts visuals to pop up, and following the finger-pointing tab reveals a “gatefold” sidebar with explanatory text, old photos and vintage flim clips. A hybrid of different communications media, the online pop-up book tells the corporate story in a fresh way.

Aside from the fact that these are charming images embroidered by New York-based illustrator Jillian Tamaki, the covers of Penguin Threads Classics signal yet another move to define non-electronic publishing as more than a vehicle for communications. Traditional publishers can no longer assume that readers will stay loyal to print because e-books are harder to read due to screen glare, not offered in full-color, crippled by short battery life, limited in availability of subjects and titles, etc. Over the past year, the iPad, Kindle, Nook and other e-readers have proved otherwise, and are getting better with each iteration.

How are printed books supposed to compete? By selling themselves as three-dimensional, tactile objects that people want to own. Most adults of a certain age have probably read all three of these classics in their youth. If not, the titles are readily available for download. The reason you’d want to buy a hard copy of these Penguin Threads is because the sculpted embossed covers reproduce the look and feel of Tamaki’s exquisite embroidery. You don’t necessarily want to reread these stories, you want to hold the book in your hand, feel the paper, the texture, the craftsmanship. You want to own the book in the same way that many of us want to own a beautiful poster we’ve seen online. The pleasure, the experience is different than just looking at it on a screen.

That applies to other printed matter as well, even direct mail catalogs. Ink-on-paper is a tangible medium that appeals to multiple senses. Its physical qualities engage our brains on a more active and emotional level. So it seems that designers need to stop thinking of print as simply an information delivery method, and start taking advantage of the amazing range of advanced printing techniques that make the material more tactile and visually dimensional.

Here are my favorites. 1. George Lois, The Esquire Covers @MoMa. A look at some of the best magazine covers… EVER! 2. Mapping America: Exploring the Continent. A magical look at cartography from Lewis & Clark to the typographic textures of Paula Scher. 3. Alphabets: A Miscellany of Letters. An historical look at curious typographic forms from the origin of alphabets to x-rated typefaces.

4. Art Direction: Explained at Last. Steve Heller’s and Veronique Vienne’s umpteenth book on design. Explaining in detail what you do for a living to your mother. 5. Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World). Charming, beautiful, thoughtful and enigmatic, as only Maira can be. 6. Wine Labels: On Bottle Design. A gorgeous look at wine labels in context. I bought it without opening it because of its cork cover and was thrilled to find that the inside was as luscious as the cover. 7. Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles Volume 1 and 2. If you love type, they are a must in your collection, 8. The Poster: A Thousand Posters from Toulouse-Lautrec to Sagmeister. Need I say more. 9. The Geometry of Pasta. A most entertaining book, written by a graphic designer, about the link between pasta shapes, geometry and design. The pasta recipes are a bonus.

If you want to track any of these down, they are all available on Amazon.com.

London publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson (W&N) celebrated its 60th anniversary by issuing a specially designed, limited edition run of nine of its best-known titles, including Lolita, The Color Purple, The World According to Garp, and The Reader. To create the covers, W&N bypassed all the best known book designers and turned to of all places an advertising agency – Fallon.

Although not a typical assignment, Fallon embraced the task with enthusiasm. Mark Elwood, creative director of Fallon Design and partner at the agency, says that Fallon saw it as “a great opportunity to showcase the department’s passion for craft and design above and beyond traditional advertising briefs.” Fallon’s entire design department and all of its art directors were put to work on the job. Ultimately they presented 30-40 cover ideas, and W&N chose the concept by senior designer Monica Pirovano.

Pirovano’s idea featured a plain unbleached paperboard cover (no dust-jacket wrapper) with a die-cut window that exposed portions of the lavishly illustrated endpaper inside. The die-cut shapes and specially commissioned endpaper illustrations reflected the spirit of each work of fiction. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, used a die-cut finger as a symbolic reference to the Russian authoritarian regime and an endpaper collage with constructivist themes and iconography.

Interestingly, in some ways, the raw board cover took W&N full circle to the launch of its first publication in 1949. The anniversary covers look both contemporary and retro. With World War II just ended in 1949, Lord George Weidenfeld and Nigel Nicolson (son of the Bloomsbury Group grandee Harold) set out to launch a new magazine in the UK. The pair expected England’s wartime ban on paper for periodicals to be lifted, but just as they were about to print the first issue, they learned that the government was extending its ban on new magazines. A lawyer suggested to W&N that they could get around the restriction by printing the magazine’s content between two hard covers and calling it a book. To make it seem even more credible, he suggested publishing some real books as well. The magazine was short-lived, but the book publishing side thrived and resulted in some of the most memorable novels of the past 60 years.