The Poppy War Special Edition Box Set: The Whole Story, and Why It's Back
Table of Contents
LitJoy's The Poppy War Special Edition Box Set is coming back. A limited preorder restock opens Tuesday, September 22 at 10am MT.
Before it does, here is the whole story of this set, including the part where we got something wrong. The restock does not really make sense without it.
A Set Built for the World of Nikan
Some trilogies you finish and shelve. This is not one of those. Rin's story asks something of you, and when you finally close The Burning God, you want the books on your shelf to look like what you just went through.
That was the brief. Not beautiful for the sake of beautiful. Beautiful in a way that holds both the myth and the devastation, Sinegard and the Pantheon, without flinching from either.
📚 All three books in the Poppy War Trilogy: The Poppy War, The Dragon Republic, and The Burning God
🎨 Brand new covers by @carissa_s_art
📦 Custom slipcase
🖼️ Custom endpapers by @patsylascanoart
✎️ Tip-in artworks by @mace.tan, @gracezhuart, and @volapardus
✨ Custom page edges by @charisloke
📖 Printed on acid-free paper
It is still one of the most vivid sets we have ever made, for a story we genuinely love.
March 2025: The First Release
We revealed the set in March 2025 and opened preorders at $160. Book One was hand-signed by R.F. Kuang on a custom signature page illustrated by @patsylascanoart.
It sold out in 72 hours.
The sets shipped in August 2025, and for a few weeks it was the good kind of quiet. Photos in the Lunacorns group. Shelves rearranged to make room for a slipcase.
What Went Wrong With Book One
Then the messages started, and they were right.
Book One's three tip-in artworks had been bound at the wrong spreads. The art was perfect. The printing was perfect. The placement was not. In a set built on art and text sitting together on the right page, we were disappointed to discover the error.
Here was the hard part. We could reprint Book One with the tip-ins where they belong, but we could not ask an author to hand-sign an entire second print run. There was no single copy of Book One that could be both signed and correct.
So we did not ask you to choose. Every person who bought the box set was offered a free replacement copy of Book One with the tip-in artworks in their correct spots, to keep alongside the hand-signed copy already on the shelf. Two copies of Book One. One signed, one correct.
Why We Asked You Which Book One to Sell
That left a genuinely open question, and it was not ours to answer.
We had a limited number of sets left, and two versions of Book One that could go inside them. The hand-signed copy with the tip-ins in the wrong spots, or the corrected copy with no signature. We did not know which one you would rather own, and we were not going to guess.
So we asked the Lunacorns.
The answer came back clear: the hand-signed Book One, misplaced tip-ins and all. The signature mattered more. So that is exactly what we sold, with the placement issue written plainly into the listing. Those sets found their readers too.
What's Different About the September 2026 Restock
And then the requests kept coming, long after there was anything left to sell.
So we pulled together one more limited print run. It is a new print run, and there are two differences from 2025:
🖋️ Book One carries R.F. Kuang's digital signature, printed on the custom art page by @patsylascanoart. These are not hand-signed.
📐 Book One's tip-in artworks are in their correct spots.
Everything else is the set you have been looking at. The covers, the slipcase, the endpapers, the page edges, the tip-ins across all three books, the acid-free paper.
Estimated ship date is Summer 2027. The price is $160. All sales are final.
How to Get Yours on September 22
Preorders open Tuesday, September 22 at 10am MT on the The Poppy War Special Edition Box Set listing.
The first release sold out in 72 hours. The sets we had left after that went too. This run is limited, and there is not another one waiting behind it.
If you found LitJoy after this set disappeared, this is the part where you get to stop checking resale listings.
