Now opening for cohort two.
Our quarterly publication enters its second year. Subscriptions remain available only to invited readers, and we are once again opening a modest queue.
For the first eighteen months, The Northbound Almanac was passed between friends and a few patient strangers. Each issue was hand-bound in editions of three hundred — a slow, deliberate undertaking that we have come, perhaps stubbornly, to enjoy. There were copies misdirected by the post, copies lost to spaniels, and a handful of issues that arrived without their middle leaf — for which the editors apologise once more.
We have decided to remain small. The almanac will continue to be invitation-only, with new readers added in modest batches of around forty per quarter. If the form opposite finds you, you may join the queue. There is no public list, no rolling acceptance — just a quiet round of letters before each new edition is posted.
We make no promises about timing. The next batch of invitations is expected in late autumn, alongside the issue on river towns and their unloved bridges. The issue thereafter — slated for early spring — will treat the question of what makes a kitchen, properly speaking, a kitchen.
On the matter of timing
Readers who joined the first cohort will find their renewal notices folded inside the autumn parcel. There is no need to act on them before December: the printer's strike notwithstanding, we expect to be early this year. New readers are typically added between the early-November mailing and the late-January chapbook, with letters of welcome going out in batches each Sunday evening.
In the interest of fairness, we read applications in the order they arrive, but we are honest in saying that we sometimes pull a name forward if it accompanies a particularly good description of the books recently read. We are easily moved by an unusual reading list.
A short note on the production
The almanac is printed in Edinburgh, on paper milled in Cumbria, and bound in modest editions by a small team in Glasgow. Each subscriber's copy is numbered and entered into the ledger by hand — a practice we have not yet been clever enough to automate, and have decided not to.
Subscriptions cover the printing, the postage, and a small contribution to the next issue's printer. There is no advertising in the almanac, and there are no plans to introduce any. We have, on more than one occasion, declined offers — politely, we hope.