The Margin Planner 2027 comes with October to December 2026
Our first issue: how Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying on an upturned wheelbarrow, a 2027 planner you can start using this week, and six picture calendars.
Welcome to the first Margin newsletter. Once a month we’ll write about one book from our free shelves and the story of how it was written, and tell you what’s new on the site.
The 2027 planners are ready, and the new one comes with the rest of 2026 so you don’t have to wait for January.
William Faulkner and As I Lay Dying
In the autumn of 1929 Faulkner was 31, newly married, and the author of four novels that had barely sold. He took a night job at the University of Mississippi power plant, shovelling coal into a wheelbarrow for the boilers.
Around midnight the town went to bed and the work stopped. Faulkner turned the wheelbarrow over, used it as a desk, and wrote by hand until about four in the morning. The first page of the manuscript is dated 25 October 1929, the day after the stock market began to crash. The last is dated 11 December.
The result was As I Lay Dying: a family carrying their mother’s coffin forty miles to bury her in town, told in 59 short sections by 15 different narrators. It was published on 6 October 1930, 96 years ago this week, and it’s free on our shelves as an EPUB or a PDF typeset for your tablet.
New: the Margin Planner 2027
Our new planner has the whole of 2027: the year, quarters, months and weeks, and two pages for every day, a plan and a ruled page for notes. It also has 100 meetings, 100 lists, a 100-page notebook, goal pages, a scratchpad and a running to-do list, each with its own index. Every page is linked, with quarter and month tabs down the side and the sections along the top.
It comes with a bonus: a separate planner for October to December 2026, so you can start using it this week. Monday or Sunday start, 12- or 24-hour clock, for reMarkable, Paper Pro, Kindle Scribe and Boox. $9.95.
There’s also a Great Authors edition, with a pencil portrait of Charles Dickens on the cover and titles in an old book italic.
Six picture calendars for 2027
Our picture calendars are wall calendars for your tablet. Each has a picture for the year and one for every month, a faint scene behind every week and day page, and lettering chosen to suit its theme. There are six for 2027: Kyoto in woodblock style, a journey upriver in pen and ink, a rain-soaked neon city in ink wash, Victorian London as wood engravings, and classic muscle cars and great authors, both drawn in pencil. $19.95 each.
Sleep screens
A sleep screen is the picture an e-reader or tablet shows while it’s asleep. Ours come in packs of 13, each picture with its name and a few lines of history checked against published sources. They’re sized exactly for 21 Kobo, Boox, Supernote, Xteink and reMarkable models, and come with setup steps for each.
There are four packs so far: muscle cars and great authors in pencil, Kyoto in woodblock style, and great scientists as steel engravings, from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie and Richard Feynman. $6.99 each.
Sets and multi-buy savings
Three of the calendars now come as sets with their matching sleep screens, so the same pictures are on your calendar and your sleeping screen: the Kyoto Set, the Muscle Car Set and the Great Authors Set, each 20% off.
Other templates count towards the multi-buy discount: buy two and the whole order is 15% off, or three or more for 25% off.
Twelve free books from 1930
On 1 January, everything published in the US in 1930 entered the public domain, and we typeset twelve of those books for e-ink. As I Lay Dying is one. For October evenings there’s also The Maltese Falcon, Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, the first novel with Miss Marple, and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison.
They join the rest of our free shelves, from Homer onwards. Every book comes as an EPUB for any e-reader and a PDF typeset for your tablet, with room in the margin for notes.
If there’s a template you wish existed, or a book you’d like on the shelves, tell us.
Until November,
Margin
Get the next issue
Once a month: our author of the month, with the story of how their classic was written, and the new templates added to the site.