Tim Key's latest book He Used Thought As A Wife, a series of poems and conversations from lockdown that he started writing all the way back in March 2020, has sold out its first print run. A further run – with an extra poem – will be published in time for Valentine's Day and you can pre-order it at the link below.

In 2020, Tim Key got locked down, found an orange pen I and started writing poems. Then he started writing down his conversations. Zoom, phone, yelling down onto the street. He scribbled them down. Then it was a case of splicing them together a bit as it became apparent that it would probably be a book.

He reached out to his long time designer, Emily Juniper, to make it look beautiful and the two of them began collaborating to give their Lockdown a bit of purpose and colour. The result is Key’s fourth book, a sprawling account of three peculiar months in his bit of the UK; partly observed, partly lived, partly made-up.

This is Key’s third collaboration with Juniper. In 2017 she designed a play script for his romantic stageshow “Megadate” and last year the pair made a deck of poetical playing cards together: fifty-two poems beautifully placed on fifty-two cards and shoved into exquisitely designed boxes. As with those projects this book is produced independently. Key does the words, Emily the design. Again they have teamed up with Calverts, a printer in East London, to get the thing onto the paper, which, again has been selected by Emily.

Key and Juniper printed 3000 books and sold them all to Key’s loyal Instagram followers in the week before Christmas. Now they’ve added a single poem and reprinted and they’re ready to go out into the world.

Tim Key is a writer, actor and comedian. He won the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2009 for his comedy/poetry mash-up hour. Since then he has written three books, made five series of his radio series Tim Key’s Late Night Poetry Programme and carved out a living as Alan Partridge’s sidekick.

Pre-order Tim Key's book for February 14 publication here.