The Letterbox book subscription service: a penpal for your TBR pile.
You’re a reader, or maybe you love one. There’s not much as exciting to a reader as that next great book discovery. Welcome to The Letterbox, a monthly book subscription service designed to deliver your next favorite read, right to your door.
We offer book subscriptions in every size and style, with genres from beach reads to sports sagas, children’s picture books to crime dramas. Each subscription comes with a book, a handwritten note about why we think you’ll love it, and a very cool bookmark. Want something really tailored to your taste, or the perfect gift for the book lover in your life? My Letterbox begins with a questionnaire designed to get to the heart of what you like and what you don’t, no matter how various (or voracious) your taste. Choose once a month, one month, three months, six months or a whole year. There’s no better gift out there, for yourself or someone you love, than a personal recommendation for how to spend your reading time.
When you send a gift from The Letterbox, your favorite book lover gets a notice right away of what they can look forward to in the mail very soon. We’ll enclose a gift note from you in their first Letterbox delivery, which sports some pretty handsome custom packaging (if we do say so ourselves.)
Every My Letterbox subscription begins with a questionnaire, specifically designed by our curator to suss out the next book you won’t be able to put down. It’s not a test you study for, and the more you tell us, the better our selections will be.
Sometimes only a mystery will do (or a book about Steel Magnolias, dragon princesses, or ultra-marathoning). We get that. We offer Letterbox subscriptions in a variety of genres, digging deep into our shelves for the titles you might have missed or haven’t heard of yet.
Author, indie bookseller, professor, foodie, great cook, you name the genre, she’s got the recommendations!
So. How do you go about choosing books for The Letterbox?
I’m the book buyer at M. Judson Booksellers in Greenville, SC— which is a dream job for a lifetime reader like me. There’s something like 50,000 new books in print every year, so I’m always looking at catalogs from different publishers about what’s coming next. It’s like building a fantasy library that gets bigger every week.
How do you narrow it down?
I’m personally a fan of strong male and female literary fiction, old school hard boiled crime writing, good memoirs, weird biographies and weirder social science. I’m an avid cook, and I’ve raised two kids. I also write books and teach writing— so I’m always reading something different. Good books come in all the categories: from romance to sci-fi to children’s picture books. I love finding the ones that give the fullest picture of a genre, and lining them up for The Letterbox.
“My Letterbox” is even more curated.
Yep– when you sign up for My Letterbox, we send you a questionnaire. For me, it’s like the conversations I have with customers in the bookstore. Not just what you like to read, but what you like to do, where you come from, how you think about things. I pick a book I think you’ll like, and then I write you a little note about why I think you’ll like it.