Smoke & Hat Press
SPY NOVELS
Printed, SEWN, and bound in the Garment District, New York City.
SPY NOVELS
WHAT WE OFFER
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Signature Editions
The Signature Edition isn’t some dainty collector’s trinket—it’s leather-bound espionage, the heavy hitters of spy fiction riding shotgun with a forgotten gem you didn’t know you needed.
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Forgotten Files
The Forgotten Files dig up the espionage novels time left in the dust—obscure, clothbound, and sewn to last. They’re the cold cases of spy fiction, stories with grit under their nails and secrets worth chasing down.
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Basement archives
The Basement Archives are the dog-eared paperbacks reborn—classic spy novels pulled from the shadows, rebound by hand, and given a second life.
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Burn Journals
The Burn Journals are blank pages built for confession and conspiracy, with room inside for every scheme, secret, or late-night thought you’re not ready to say out loud.
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Smoke and Hat Junior
Smoke and Hat Junior is where the spy game starts young—children’s novels and activity books laced with mystery, codes, and a little danger tucked between the lines.
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Bookbinding Kits
The Bookbinding Kits put the tools of the trade in your hands—everything you need to stitch together a fresh novel or breathe new life into a battered classic.
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DRINKWARE
The drinkware line is built for the rituals—whiskey glasses and coffee mugs made to keep you company while you lose yourself in a good spy story. It’s the clink, the sip, the pause between chapters that turns reading into a full-on affair.
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Reading Accesories
The Reading Accessories line is all about the small but sharp details—custom bookmarks that don’t just hold your place, they leave a mark. Unique, gritty, and built for readers who treat every book like a mission worth finishing.
This isn’t just a bookbinding company.
This is a dedication to spy fiction, to leather and ink, to the kind of stories that stick with you long after you’ve caught the last train out of town. For readers who like their fiction slow-burning, sharp-edged, and built to last.
There are books you read and forget. And then there are these.
Cold war whispers. Silenced pistols. Cigarettes burning down in midnight alleys. The Signature Edition is for people who appreciate the art of espionage and the art of doing things right.
We’re talking full-grain leather—the real stuff. Not some faux, bonded nonsense that flakes off like a bad disguise. This leather has weight, grit, and just enough polish to make it dangerous. It wears in, not out, aging like a spy who’s been through hell and still knows where the bodies are buried.
Inside? Premium American paper. Smooth, thick, and meant to last longer than your attention span. This is paper that respects ink, and more importantly, respects the words. No bleeding, no curling, no cheap shortcuts. Just a damn fine canvas for damn good stories.
SMOKE AND HAT PODCAST
A weekly dispatch from the underbelly of international affairs
The world doesn’t run on press releases or talking points. It runs on backroom deals, cigar smoke, and the quiet hum of men and women moving pieces you’ll never see. Every week, the Smoke and Hat Podcast cuts through the polished nonsense and gets into the messy, bloody, bar-fight reality of international affairs.
Forget the sterile think-tank panels and bullet-point briefings. This isn’t policy for the polite cocktail crowd. This is the stuff whispered in embassy bars at 2 a.m., where diplomats, spooks, and fixers let their guard down. The conversations matter. Unvarnished, unfiltered, and dripping with the kind of truth that makes people uncomfortable.
We’re talking power, corruption, coups, oil, borders, bombs, spies, and the people caught in the middle. The stories that shape our world, stripped of spin and dressed instead in grit and whiskey.
So light a cigarette, pour a strong drink, and join me every week as we go looking for the world’s hidden levers. Because international affairs isn’t polite dinner conversation. It’s a knife fight in the alley and it pays to know who’s holding the blade.
NYC USA
Real Spy Stories. No Martini. No Spotlight. Just the Truth, Bound in Cloth.
These aren’t your glossy Hollywood spies with perfect suits and witty one-liners. These are the stories that got lost in the shuffle. Buried in basements. Filed under “classified.” Too raw, too weird, or too real to make the final cut in the official version of history.
The Forgotten Files Collection is a tribute to the operatives who didn’t get medals. The ones who vanished behind enemy lines. The ones who lied for a living and died without fanfare. We dug up their stories—memoirs, reports, and long-forgotten novels—and wrapped them in textured cloth bindings, stamped clean and quiet like a dossier that just showed up on your desk with no return address.
This isn’t nostalgia. This is reverence for the messy, complicated, morally gray business of real espionage.
Some books are meant to be dog-eared, left behind in cheap motels, traded in smoky bars between friends who don’t trust each other.
But not these.
At Smoke and Hat, we take the best damn espionage novels ever written and BUILD them the way they should’ve been made in the first place. GENUINE leather. The BEST CLOTH YOU CAN FIND. Sewn. Ready for a lifetime of bad decisions and border crossings.
Because some books aren’t just books. They’re ghosts that haunt us long after we’ve put them down.
7th Floor PRESS NOTES
From the bindery floor to your ears
The machines don’t lie. They hum, grind, and groan their way through every sheet of paper, every stitch of thread, every splash of ink. Up here on the 7th floor, the press never sleeps — and neither do the stories that come out of it.
7th Floor Press Notes is your backstage pass into the smoke-stained, glue-splattered shop where books get broken down and rebuilt, where spy novels and forgotten manuscripts are given a second life. It’s not glossy, it’s not polite, and it sure as hell isn’t quiet.
Each week we crack open what’s happening in the shop:
The triumphs and screw-ups of the week’s binding runs.
New tools, old tricks, and experiments that either work like a dream or blow up in our face.
The real cost of making things by hand in a world that wants everything fast and disposable.
This isn’t marketing fluff. It’s a field note, raw from the benches and presses. The kind of chatter you’d hear if you were leaning against the shop wall, a beer in hand, watching the chaos unfold.
So pull up a stool. Smell the ink. Hear the press kick on. The 7th floor’s got stories to tell, and you’re invited.
Paperbacks Reimagined. Stories Reborn. Half-Bound in Leather, Ready for the Mission.
You’ve seen them before—creased spines, dog-eared pages, torn covers that barely hang on. The mass-market spy paperbacks of another era: Cold War thrillers, covert ops, midnight betrayals. Maybe they lived in your back pocket once. Maybe you picked one up at a secondhand stall, read it cover to cover on a train through nowhere.
Now, we’ve brought them back—but not as they were.
The Basement Archives Series takes these once-forgotten paperback spy novels and gives them a second life—rebound, redesigned, and half-bound in genuine leather. Each book is carefully disassembled, its text block preserved, and then rebuilt with new covers that combine rugged utility with timeless style.
The result? A book that still carries the pulpy grit and backroom tension of its original form, but wrapped in materials that command attention and demand respect.
Garment District
Garment District
WE get it. you can chase cheap labor across the globe, cut corners, and slap your name on some mass-produced, soulless product. Or you can do it the HARD way. You can make something that actually matters.
That means making it in New York City’s Garment District. a place where craftsmanship still counts, where people actually give a damn about the work they do, and where history and hustle collide to create something worth Reading.
Paperbacks don’t age well. They get dog-eared, their spines crack, pages fall out like teeth from a junkie’s smile. But the stories inside? They’re still alive, still worth saving. That’s what these kits are about—sitting down at the kitchen table with a drink, hands sticky with glue, thread pulled tight, giving a cheap paperback a second life it never knew it deserved.
Everything inside is built for the job, not for show. Archival glue that won’t yellow. Linen tape and thread tough enough to hold a book together long after the factory binding has failed. Boards and covers waiting for you to wrap the thing in a new skin. The guide doesn’t read like a craft manual—it’s a mission briefing. Strip the book down, sew it back together, glue and clamp it, then dress it in boards. When you’re done, you’re holding something that feels real, something built to last.
Why bother? Because books aren’t meant to be disposable. Because there’s a quiet satisfaction in stitching pages together, hearing the spine set hard under your hands, and knowing you’ve rescued something the world decided was temporary. The work is gritty, slow, and stubbornly analog—more meditation than hobby, more rebellion than pastime.
These kits aren’t for everyone. They’re for readers who can’t let go of the book they’ve carried for years. For journal-keepers who want a notebook built by their own hands. For the gift-giver who knows meaning lives in effort, not price tags. In a world obsessed with the disposable, this is the antidote. You’re not just rebinding a paperback—you’re binding yourself back to a tradition that refuses to die.
A book is more than just words on a page. It’s something you hold, something you feel. The weight in your hands, the scent of rich leather, the whisper of finely crafted paper as you turn the page. these are the things that make reading an experience, not just an action.
That’s why quality matters. If you’re going to bind a book, do it right. Use full-grain leather, the kind that ages beautifully, developing character over time—just like the stories it holds. Use archival-grade paper, thick and smooth, the kind that doesn’t just absorb ink but enhances it. A book like this isn’t just something you own, it’s something you keep.
Quality Materials
Spy games don’t have to wait until you’re old enough for bourbon and late nights in dim bars. Curiosity starts young—the itch to crack codes, chase shadows, and find out what’s really going on when the adults aren’t looking. Smoke and Hat Junior is where we bottle that energy and hand it straight to the kids. Books and activity packs designed to keep their hands busy, their imaginations burning, and their eyes wide open to the thrill of discovery.
These aren’t sugar-coated bedtime stories. They’re adventures with grit under the nails—treasure hunts in the margins, secret messages tucked between chapters, activities that feel more like missions than homework. One day they’re piecing together a cipher, the next they’re chasing a spy across the pages of a classic tale dressed up in new clothes. Every book and activity kit is built to fire up that part of a kid’s brain that wants to solve puzzles and break rules.
We give them the tools, not just the stories. Mazes, codes, word scrambles, blank spaces for doodles and notes. Little dossiers disguised as coloring pages. Notebooks that feel like field guides. It’s about giving kids the space to imagine themselves as agents in their own right—watching, recording, plotting, laughing along the way.
Because childhood should have some mystery, some grit, some shadows to chase. Smoke and Hat Junior is about sparking that hunger early and showing kids that books aren’t just for reading—they’re for living inside, scribbling on, tearing apart and putting back together. It’s where the next generation of spies, readers, and mischief-makers get their start.
SMOKE AND HAT PRESS
SMOKE AND HAT PRESS
From the heart of Manhattan to your bookshelf.
Beggarman PODCAST
A Podcast About Classic Spy Novels, Tradecraft, and the People Who Know Things
There was a time when spies didn’t wear tights or hack satellites from a MacBook in a coffee shop. They smoked too much, drank worse, and carried secrets like a tumor. That’s the world we’re interested in.
Beggarman is a podcast for people who still believe in Cold War paperbacks, typewriters, and ashtrays full of unfinished business. We dive headfirst into the best (and sometimes weirdest) corners of classic espionage fiction. The stories with real grit. Real consequence. Real betrayals.
We talk to the writers who carry the torch, the historians who know what actually happened in Budapest in ’56, and the occasional ex-spook who can speak about what it feels like to live a life of half-truths and hotel bars.
This isn’t some slick thriller recap show. It’s a love letter to the genre that understood long before anyone else that nothing is what it seems.
What you’ll get:
Deep dives into spy novels that matter (and some that just feel right)
Insights into authors, academics, and insiders
No hype. No hot takes. Just smoke, mirrors, and a little bit of blood under the fingernails
OUR NEXT DROP
Look, the world’s loud, fast, and full of junk. But every once in a while, you come across a story that deserves to be treated right—wrapped in leather, aged like bourbon, and made to last longer than the latest algorithm.
That’s what we do.
We take cold war back alleys, cigarette smoke, double-crosses, and typewriter clacks—and we bind them by hand. Real books. Real leather. Real work.
Sign up for the newsletter if any of this speaks to you:
First dibs on limited-run editions before the Instagram crowd gets wind
Peeks behind the curtain—how the sausage gets made, bookbinding-style
Invitations to stuff we don’t talk about on the homepage
The occasional rant, reading list, or dispatch worth your time
No fluff. No fake urgency. Just the good stuff.
Join the list. Or don’t. We’re not begging.
Rondezvous
Conversations at the crossroads of espionage, literature, and the human condition
Every secret meeting has a code name. This one’s called Rondezvous. It’s where spies, writers, and thinkers slip into the booth across from me and spill what they know. Not the sanitized version — the real stuff. The kind of stories traded in dimly lit bars, where the ice melts too fast and the truth comes out sideways.
Each week, I sit down with authors, experts, and insiders to dig into the shadow worlds that shape our headlines and our imaginations. From Cold War dead drops to the craft of spy fiction, from revolutions to betrayals, it’s a long pour of history, politics, and storytelling with no chaser.
Forget the polite interview circuit. Rondezvous is raw, unfiltered, and alive with the tension of things half-said and truths half-hidden. The questions go where they have to, and the answers aren’t always neat.
So, come meet me at the table. The password is simple: pull up a chair, order a drink, and listen close. Because every good story starts with a Rondezvous.
