Trivia / The Testaments

• Content Leak: Despite taking significant pains to prevent spoilers for the book from leaking (to the extent that they threatened lawsuits against indie bookstores and produced dummy copies of the book to throw off thieves), publisher Penguin Random House's efforts were for naught when Amazon (U.S.) accidentally sent out approximately 800 copies of the book a week before street date, thus rendering all the efforts to keep the plot a secret moot.
• Fandom Nod: Members of the terrorist resistance group Mayday now have a second password to identify themselves to each other: "June moon". This is presumably a reference to the couple of instances in the first novel where the word "June" is used in a significant context (and especially to the phrase "mooning and June-ing", used of Handmaids pining for their past lives), which led many readers to believe it was Offred's way of indirectly revealing her first name. (Atwood later revealed this wasn't her original intention, but she liked it enough to go with it, and it later became a case of Ascended Fanon in the TV series.)
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: The book had no less than two separate limited runs of hardcover editions priced at premium levels ($1,000 USD and up), including one distributed by Penguin Random House in a 100-piece run (with special packaging and endpapers) and a limited run produced by McClelland & Stewart for the Pelee Island Bird Observatory (a non-profit centre Atwood supports in Canada) that includes a special envelope containing "artifacts" mentioned in the book itself (such as Aunt Lydia's list and a Defictionalization pamphlet with one of the poems spoken in the text).
• Sequel Gap: The Handmaid's Tale was first published in 1985; the sequel was published thirty-four years later in 2019. Margaret Atwood began writing The Testaments in 2017 in conjunction with the television adaptation of the first book, stating she felt the themes of The Handmaid's Tale were just as relevant now as they were in the 1980s.

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