Issue 34. If you’ve not seen it in the flesh yet it has a white front cover and a wonderful Frances Barry illustration of a magpie on the back cover.

There’s nothing else on the front cover: no print, no watermark, no colour, just white. But on some of the copies that we got back from the printers there are things. They might be little track marks or clip marks or smudges of black, but they’re there. They came about during the packing stage of the printing because the paper stock we chose was uncoated and so it lifted ink matter (a bit like an offset print) from the other magazines. This fascinated us, but it also meant we had 70 unusable magazines – this is the profit margin the magazine needs to live off. So we asked our printers, the wonderful Imprint Digital, first, what was wrong, and second, what could be done. They told us to always use coated stock if we don’t want to print an image on the cover, and then they sent us some more. We could do what we wanted with the faulty-ish copies.

So we decided to pass our good fortune on to you.

There’s nothing wrong with the inside of the magazine – the very important stuff – and the marks to anyone else wouldn’t be such a problem, so we’re offering these slight-seconds to you for just £3 (through Stonewood Press because we don’t sell single copies) with free P&P in the UK with the #pimpmystar code voucher.

But we ask you to have some fun with them – decorate them, glue things on them, draw on them, write your own poem or flash-fiction on them – and then send them in to us at brittlestarmag@gmail.com or upload them to Pinterest (but tell us about them too) and we’ll make a gallery of them! And the two we love the most (one I choose, one Martin chooses) we’ll give a subscription or subs-renewal to. You must sign it and send it or upload it so that we know who you are. And if we really love them we might even use one for a back cover of a future issue!

To start you off, here’s mine!

There’s been a lot of shooting stars this month and I like birds – I get the feeling these two are gossiping but I don’t know what about! (I feel a caption competition coming on!)

So, go ahead, grab a copy (grab another if you’ve already bought one) and pimp your brittle star! Have fun! #pimpmystar

Jacqueline