Independent bookstores aren’t the only growing businesses dedicated to physical media emerging around the country. In 2025, Night Owl Video, featuring a wide-ranging selection of Blu-rays and DVDs, opened its doors in Brooklyn; boutique Blu-ray distributor Vinegar Syndrome is set to open a new shop in Minneapolis later this year. Both can be seen as part of a larger trend of renewed interest in physical media — and so it isn’t surprising to see a growing number of Blu-ray distributors packaging books and Blu-rays together. What is notable about this are the ways in which these companies are going about it, from memoir/movie bundles to commissioning anthologies of horror fiction.

In 2024, Vinegar Syndrome debuted a new imprint, Cinématographe, designed to “to fill gaps in the canon of American cinema.” Thus far, that has included releasing lesser-known movies from filmmakers like Paul Schrader (the Elmore Leonard adaptation Touch) and Robert Altman (Thieves Like Us). Similar to other boutique Blu-ray distributors like Arrow, Radiance Films, and the Criterion Collection, Cinématographe’s releases are meticulously designed and produced, with the kind of lovingly-designed packaging that looks excellent on a shelf. And sometimes, they come paired with books.

Cinephiles interested in directly purchasing two of the imprint’s latest releases — writer/director Robinson Devor’s adaptation of The Woman Chaser (a film noir about an aspiring filmmaker making questionable decisions) and Elaine May’s directorial debut A New Leaf (a dark comedy about inherited wealth, romance, and murder) — had the option to package their purchase with a corresponding book. For Devor’s film, that was the source novel by Charles Willeford; for May’s, it was Carrie Courogen’s 2024 biography Miss May Does Not Exist.

As the imprint’s curator Justin LaLiberty told PW, these weren’t the first cases where Cinématographe had paired books with films. A limited edition of Schrader’s Touch, about a faith healer, came packaged alongside a copy of the Leonard novel. And cinephiles seem to be embracing these limited-edition sets: as of this writing, the book/Blu-ray packages for A New Leaf, The Woman Chaser, Touch, Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Spalding Gray’s monologue Swimming to Cambodia, Abel Ferrera’s science fiction thriller New Rose Hotel (paired with Ferrera’s memoir Scene), and Robert Altman’s Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (paired with a copy of the source play) had all sold out.

Cinématographe isn’t the only company that’s asked a big question: if you love physical media so much, why not add some more physical media to the package?

A24’s online store gives the option to purchase the studio’s recent Blu-ray of Darren Aronofsky’s debut feature Pi, about a brilliant mathematician struggling with paranoia and existential fears, in tandem with a new edition of The Guerilla Diaries, Aronofsky’s 1999 book about the making of said indie film. That isn’t the only way A24 has explored publishing; the company also recently released horror writer Tim Waggoner’s novelizations of writer-director Ti West’s X trilogy, an ambitious reimagining of slasher movies with both sexual repression and cycles of violence on its mind. And the boutique Blu-ray company Severin Films has assembled several intriguing book and film pairings, including a folk horror anthology and a guide to exploitation films of the 1970s.

What is X?

In 1999, when Faber & Faber published The Guerilla Diaries, Aronofsky was an up-and-coming director with one feature under his belt, Pi. When A24 reissued the book 25 years later, Aronofsky was a much more established name, having directed Natalie Portman and Brendan Fraser in their Oscar-winning roles. A24’s new edition of Aronofsky’s book reflects the changes in the filmmaker’s career — and involved a collaboration with Fabian Bremer’s design studio,

“While the narrative still generally follows Darren’s diary entries chronologically, we intentionally break it up at times to create moments of distraction and disorientation,” he said, which evokes Pi’s fractured interiority. Bremer pointed out that his studio’s work on the project felt like it expanded past design, comparing it to “becoming an extension of the editorial team as graphic designers.”

A24’s unorthodox approach to reissuing Aronofsky’s book isn’t the only way the studio had gone a different route with its publishing projects. Waggoner told PW that the process behind writing his novelizations of the X trilogy was significantly different from his other experiences adapting films into books.

“Normally, writers and directors aren’t involved in the novelizations of their films, but Ti West read the drafts of each novel and provided feedback,” Waggoner explained. “Being able to watch the movies as I wrote allowed me to add elements from the finished film to the books — the actors’ performances, set and costume design.”

The wild world of folk horror

To accompany the second volume of Severin Films’ mammoth folk horror box set All the Haunts Be Ours, encompassing disquieting stories about ancient and folkloric supernatural forces and unsettling rituals from all over the world, producer Kier-La Janisse wanted to create something unique.

She decided to commission new work. “Why don't we make the book new fiction this time?” she recalled thinking. “We could give people a basic prompt, and they can create new fiction around it.” The lineup Janisse assembled includes a number of big names in the world of horror fiction, including Ramsey Campbell, Cassandra Khaw, and Cynthia Pelayo.

A 252-page folk horror anthology isn’t the only tome Janisse has worked on for Severin. She also compiled The Black Emanuelle Bible, a full-color book of essays on the globetrotting 1970s sexploitation series that accompanied a 15-disc box set released in 2023 but can also be purchased on its own. The series, especially the first installment, has also been praised for its often subversive handling of questions of race, gender, and post-colonial aesthetics.

“I went to town on the book,” Janisse explained. “It's the most scholarship that's ever been written about this series.” Janisse also stated that, at 360 pages in length, The Black Emanuelle Bible is “the biggest book that has ever been published in any Blu-ray, as far as I know.”

For some companies’ forays into books, the process is less complicated than the work Janisse and Severin Films have done for their in-house literary productions. For instance, LaLiberty explained that when purchasing books for the book/Blu-ray packages, “we just purchased wholesale.” But in an era when both beautifully-designed books and boutique Blu-ray packages have a distinct audience, it’s not surprising to see some distributors find a way to do both.