Book covers by Toby Manhire. Correction: book covers by Toby Morris, but Toby Manhire put them on the sofa and took a picture with his phone which is pretty much the same thing.
Book covers by Toby Manhire. Correction: book covers by Toby Morris, but Toby Manhire put them on the sofa and took a picture with his phone which is pretty much the same thing.

BooksNovember 5, 2019

It’s alive! The Spinoff Book is out now

Editor-at-large
Book covers by Toby Manhire. Correction: book covers by Toby Morris, but Toby Manhire put them on the sofa and took a picture with his phone which is pretty much the same thing.
Book covers by Toby Manhire. Correction: book covers by Toby Morris, but Toby Manhire put them on the sofa and took a picture with his phone which is pretty much the same thing.

A bumper crop of the best of our first five years on Planet Earth, plus a slew of new stuff, The Spinoff Book is out today. Here’s what you’ll find in it, and how to get a copy.  

In a bold pivot to print, The Spinoff today publishes an actual book. You can pick it up and hold it in your hands, you can thumb through it, you can throw it, catch it, spin it like a bottle. You can set it on fire and explode parliament with it. (Please don’t do that. Just a topical Guy Fawkes reference, etc.)

You might even want to read it. We’ve assembled some of the very best of the first five years of the site, along with a bunch of freshly written material which has never seen the light of pixels, and lashings of new and beautiful full-colour illustrations by the completely brilliant Toby Morris. There’s photography. Poems! A proper bloody index! 

We’ve printed more than 12,000 articles over the last five years, and I read them all* to whittle this down a svelte, luminous 384 pages. 

All your Spinoff favourites/enemies are there, from the Originals, Duncan Greive and Alex Casey through to Madeleine Chapman, Leonie Hayden, Hayden Donnell, Emily Writes and José Barbosa. There’s David Farrier, Ashleigh Young, Hera Lindsay Bird, Jesse Mulligan, Madeleine Holden, Scotty Stevenson, Annabelle Lee, Morgan Godfery, Henry Oliver, and heaps more whom I’ve omitted to mention, please don’t be mad with me. Plus: fresh from the World Cup in Japan, top All Blacks including Jemaine Clement, Clarke Gayford and Lorde.

There’s also all the unpublished stuff. Such as Duncan Greive’s definitive untold story of how The Spinoff was born. Leonie Hayden’s compelling essay asking why the Māori media surge seems to have largely left print journalists behind. And Madeleine Chapman on the limits of the things she’ll do in the name of journalism.

More Reading

    I’m hoping it makes a really interesting chronicle of the last five years in New Zealand culture, and I would just note in passing that there are only 40-something shopping days to Christmas.

    The Spinoff Book is available from today at all good bookstores, retailing at $38. And if you want to support more of The Spinoff’s independent, homegrown journalism, you can join our Members programme – contribute $80 or more and join before the end of November 2019 you’ll get the book for free. And help us survive – who knows?! – for another five years.

    * At least the headlines.

    Keep going!