The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary - Jack Halpern (Editor)

My current dictionary of choice. It uses a great system called SKIP to help you look up kanji you don't recognise quickly, without all that mucking about with radicals. It also has the usual on / kun indexes. The entries are very informative, including readings, stroke count and order, and core meanings to help you remember the kanji effectively.
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Kanji Pict-O-Graphix : Over 1,000 Japanese Kanji and Kana Mnemonics - Michael Rowley

This is a great book, which uses some very well-designed associative pictures (or "visual mnemonics") to help you remember kanji (and also hiragana and katakana). The book is very inventive and really works. It has about 1,200 kanji in total, but they don't include all of the JLPT kanji and are grouped by topics. That aside, it is an excellent work for either study or just an introduction to kanji.
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Write Your Name in Kanji - Nobuo Sato

A book which lets you change your clumsy Western name into elegant Japanese kanji - with hilarious results. This can be done phonetically or denotatively. Phonetically is more fun - because the kanji themselves have meaning as well as just a phonetic value, you can then translate the kanji back into English. An example is Christopher, which becomes kurisutofaa, which can then be kanjified as "A bird which vomits chestnuts into its nest." Superb stuff. Another must buy.
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Tuttle Kanji Cards - Alexander Kask

Making your own kanji flashcards is good for practicing stroke order, researching vocabulary and taking control of your kanji study - for the first 80, anyway, after which point it rapidly becomes more hassle than it's worth. Buy these instead. Two volumes cover 1000 common kanji, giving you all the readings, stroke order, radical info and example vocab. Tough enough to withstand intensive study sessions on Thai beaches.
Volume 1: Amazon.com (US) / Amazon.co.uk (UK) / Amazon.co.jp (Japan)
Volume 2: Amazon.com (US) / Amazon.co.uk (UK) / Amazon.co.jp (Japan)

Kanji & Kana : A Handbook of the Japanese Writing System - Wolfgang Hadamitzky, Mark Spahn

Probably most useful as a syllabus of sorts, this book takes you through the 2,000 most common kanji in order, giving you a solid framework around which to base your kanji studies. Doesn't include stroke order and only has a few example compounds for each character, but pretty useful nonetheless.
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