Brandon Sanderson may be best known as an absurdly prolific author of fantasy and science fiction novels, but at this point he's also built a pretty strong publishing house behind himself as well in Dragonsteel Books. Dragonsteel mostly focuses on deluxe editions and various special printings of Sanderson's books, but late last year they announced an exciting expansion in the form of The Wheel of Time leatherbound project, which aims to produce one premium quality leatherbound edition of Robert Jordan's opus per year. At the end, fans will hopefully have the sort of beautiful collector's edition set that The Wheel of Time has always deserved.
The first book getting this treatment is, of course, The Eye of the World, which starts the series. Sanderson announced The Eye of the World leatherbound last December at his Dragonsteel Nexus convention, with the rough goal that his company was aiming to have the book available by Winter 2025. If you have a calendar, you may have noticed that there's only a month and a half left in 2025, and there's still no solid release date for The Eye of the World leatherbound. What's going on?
Fortunately, Sanderson is extremely communicative with his fans, so there is now an answer to the mystery of the missing Wheel of Time leatherbound. In his most recent weekly YouTube update, Sanderson brought on Dragonsteel art director Isaac Stewart to provide an update about the leatherbound project. It turns out, the delay is all about getting the quality just right.
The Eye of the World leatherbound edition is "very close" to finished
Stewart explained that the hold up has to do with getting the leatherbound cover for The Eye of the World perfected. This isn't just a vanity thing for this specific book, but a crucial step to make sure that the entire series looks right on readers' bookshelves.
"One of the reasons is we are trying to take 15 books, and come up with a cover design that works across all of them. Hopefully we'll be making these books for the next 20+ years, and so we want to be very careful at this first stage," Stewart said. "We take a look at a lot of different things, just making sure, can we fit all the titles in the space that's available? Is there space for Brandon's name eventually when we do the later books? Is there space for being able to fit the number on the spine? These are the things we think about from a design standpoint."
Stewart added that there are also manufacturing considerations in the mix as well, such as getting the look and feel of the cover just right. He showed off a gorgeous example of the cover, which you can see in the video above. It's a custom shade of red with custom modeling that was created just for this project, and it took time to settle on that. "You're just not going to see this exact color and leather on any other book. This is just for The Wheel of Time," he said.
"We're trying to make this experience be a very tactile experience, so that when you pick up the book, it just feels right. It feels like The Wheel of Time, it feels classy, it feels like something that hopefully Robert Jordan himself would have on his shelf were he still here, and also be proud of."
Stewart went into a few more details about some of the intricate manufacturing challenges for the book; I'd definitely recommend giving a watch above if you're interested so you can see him handle it as he explains.
When does The Eye of the World leatherbound edition release?
But of course, the big question on most readers' mind is, when will these books actually be available? No release date was confirmed in the video, but Stewart assured fans that Dragonsteel is "very close" to having the books completed.
"We go into this basically with a fine-tooth comb, do another pass — which is where we're at — and then these [covers] are going to go right back to the bindery to be bound to the books," he said. "That's where we're at right now. We're very close. We're going to have these books in hand in a few months, and we hope you'll love them."
Sanderson closed out the video by singing the praises of Bind Tech, the company working on binding the leatherbounds. "You guys are really going to love these Wheel of Time books, and I think you'll have plenty of opportunities to see them next year as we get them in," the author said in conclusion.
We'll have our ear to the ground for more updates about Dragonsteel's The Wheel of Time leatherbound project. But if you want to be the absolute first to find out any news about these leatherbounds, you should sign up for the project's newsletter.