If you follow us anywhere you've seen us going on and on about how excited we are to have sold out May's box three times. We made the most boxes so far this time around and we've really loved seeing all of your reactions. If you've tweeted, blogged, instagrammed or told friends about your box THANK YOU. With a business this size (or any size, but particularly small) your recommendations are literally what helps us to survive and keep bringing awesome books to people. It means the world!
This box marked several firsts for us - a book that isn't published for adults, a book that's recently published rather than backlist, more than one item designed exclusively for us, and more than one thing that we produced ourselves! Suffice to say that a lot of work and a lot of love went into this box, and the book is probably our favourite that we've included so far, and definitely my favourite book of 2017 so far.
The first item we commissioned for this box was this beautiful 'Books are a Uniquely Portable Magic' quote print made especially for us by Always Bookish. We published an interview with Lilee last week so check that out for more about her and her brilliant business. The quote is very relevant to the book we picked this month and sums up something a lot of us feel, I think.
The second item we had exclusively made for this box involved lengthy discussion with Elle of Good Book Hunting about scents, colours and the use of glitter and we hope you'll agree she did a fantastic job! The Magical Library candle she made for us is really something quite special with gentle fragrance and gorgeous green and purple glitter. We love it!
We were so inspired by the book for this box that we indulged our creative urges and made lots of things for it ourselves. Firstly I spent hours plaiting Dragon bookmarks and sewing tiny glasses cases for the charm (which will make total sense once you read the book, we promise!) and then we had the brainwave to include a little grow your own Dragon Fruit set, and have tested our origami skills making teeny tiny seed envelopes. We hope you have fun growing your own Dragon Fruit.
You'll probably notice if you've had a box that there's an item in the picture that you didn't receive - because of postage regulations we were unable to send the Dragon Fruit set to our subscribers in the US and Australia and so substituted the gorgeous Tolkien inspired notebook from Fable & Black (which you can now find in our shop).
And the book itself... When I was compiling our 24 Independently Published Books to Look for in 2017 feature back in January I discovered that one of my favourite authors Scarlett Thomas had a new book coming out in April - her first book for children, Dragon's Green. As you can imagine we leapt at the chance to work with Cannongate and include it in this box! I've loved all the books we've included in our boxes so far, but this one was a bit special for me and I'm so happy we were able to include it. We've had great feedback on it so far.
We also included a calling card style invitation to our book group chat over in our forum which anyone who wants to talk about the book is welcome to join. It'll be on June 25th at 8pm GMT in our forum (which is free to join) so come and chat with us! You can order the book from Wordery, with free worldwide shipping, here.
It's such a brilliant, intense experience putting these boxes together and sometimes it's easy to forget that we've actually been making them less than a year and this was only our third box! We are definitely still learning and appreciate all of your feedback. We've just changed our boxes to hopefully more sturdy ones and are always looking for ways to make boxes ever better!
Subscriptions are open now and have been reduced to just £26 per box. They automatically renew each quarter, meaning you'll guarantee yourself a box - numbers for individual purchase in August will be very limited, and no money will be taken until July for the August box!
If you missed this box or just want a little extra ninja joy before the next quarterly box in August you can grab yourself one of our Summer Reading boxes, themed A Grand Adventure and containing three wonderful independent books for adults, kids, teens, or a mixture of all here.