Folio Society Releases $760 Atwood Gilead Box Set — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- The Folio Society is releasing a $760 collector's edition box set of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" and "The Testaments," limited to 750 hand-signed copies and available exclusively through the publisher beginning Nov. 3.
- The source explicitly flags that the Nov. 3 release date coincides with U.S. Election Day — the 2026 midterms, which will determine all 435 House seats and roughly one-third of the Senate.
- Italian illustrators Anna and Elena Balbusso (the Balbusso Twins) created new artwork combining pencil, watercolor, gouache and tempera with digital methods, describing the visual approach as a "surrealist nightmare"; the sisters also illustrated Folio's 2012 "Handmaid's Tale" edition.
- The books are printed by Grafiche Veneziane, Venice's oldest book printer, transported by gondola, and leather-bound by Graphicom — with each copy signed by the Balbusso Twins.
- Atwood contributed a new introduction in which she writes that the artwork evokes "the feel and the colour palette of the thirties and forties, the age of the rise of the major dictatorships."
- Naomi Alderman ("The Power") wrote a new foreword calling Gilead "the name of a force trying to push itself back into the world."
- The Folio Society has previously produced deluxe editions of George R.R. Martin's "A Game of Thrones," Madeline Miller's "The Song of Achilles" and Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."
Why it matters: The Folio Society timed a $760, 750-copy release of novels about a totalitarian regime that strips women of their rights to land on U.S. Election Day — a resonance Atwood herself leans into by invoking "the age of the rise of the major dictatorships" in her new introduction. For the deep-pocketed collector market the publisher cultivates, the timing converts a luxury book product into a politically freighted artifact.
Ask SkimNews
