Books in Batches

11 February 2011

As some of you may know, we were caught by surprise over the holidays and completely sold out of Tree of Codes. And, well, it’s happened again. Less of a surprise this time, but we’ve sold out of the next batch of books in just 5 days.

So here’s the thing. The book is really, really complicated to produce. It goes through a lot of different stages of production (printing, trimming, die-cutting, collating and binding) and most of those stages are outsourced. That means that there is a special die-cutter in the Netherlands who handles all the cutting, a protected workplace in Belgium that collates the pages. You get the idea.

The entire production process from start to finish takes 3 months. But we didn’t want anyone waiting as long as 3 months to get their hands on the book, so what we’ve worked out with the printers is that they send us the books in batches, as and when they’re ready. We got the first batch just 5 days ago, which is what has just sold out.

The good news is our second batch will be with us end of February and then a third batch in March. As our warehouse guys put it to us this morning so perfectly, it’s a really good problem to have. All it means is we need to wait another little bit for more books to come. You can still pre-order through us (we kinda think that’s a good idea seeing how it’s been going so far).

Oh! And we’ve got a stunning film the printers sent us which we’re going to show you where you can see just how many stages the books goes through to be made.
More on that very soon. Promise.

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