“The Bookhouse Institute blends the magic of books, the thrill of escape rooms, and the mystery of buried treasure into a series of enchanting projects.”
Press enquiries
DJ Southworth — press@bookhouse.uk
It is normal for us to take a few days to read correspondence and a few more to respond thoughtfully. The culture of immediacy is not one the Institute has adopted.
The Bookhouse Institute is an independent publishing and puzzle design studio, established in 2025. It produces books containing original treasure hunts, each with a real, claimable prize. Its publications are all designed around a central premise: that a book can be a practical object and a puzzle simultaneously.
At the heart of everything the Institute makes is a simple belief: that the sense of wonder most of us felt as children, that unshakeable suspicion that the world is hiding something magnificent, is worth preserving. These are books for the part of you that still thinks there might be a map behind the wallpaper.
All work is curated and developed by DJ Southworth. Rather than maintaining a fixed creative staff, each project draws on a different team of collaborators assembled specifically for the work at hand. It is, in that sense, a studio built around individual books rather than books built around a studio.
An independent publishing and puzzle design studio producing books with real treasure hunts hidden inside them.
A book in which a series of puzzles is embedded into the text, images, and design, leading the reader toward a real, claimable prize that exists somewhere in the physical world.
Yes. Every treasure hunt has a real prize, clearly described, that can be claimed by whoever solves it first.
The winner contacts the Institute to claim their prize, and the solution is published. The book remains in print, but the treasure hunt is retired.
All publications are available via bookhouse.uk, with selected titles available through major retailers including Bookshop.org and Amazon.
Because DJ Southworth didn't found it so much as inherit it. Among the material left by a distant relative was a solicitor's letter, a set of deeds, and the address of a lock-up. The lock-up, when he found it, contained decades of ephemera, research, correspondence, and design, alongside several methodological manuals and hundreds of plans for treasure hunts that had never been published or run. The Institute had, in some form, already existed. DJ simply became responsible for it. The Bookhouse Institute's current programme exists to take that accumulated work and ask, piece by piece, whether it can finally be made real.
DJ Southworth is a British product and graphic designer and the Director of the Bookhouse Institute. He oversees all publications, puzzle design, and creative output.
Yes. Interview requests can be made via the press contact and are considered individually.
The lock-up, the ephemera, and the material are all real. Whether everything in it is what it appears to be is, in some cases, still being established.
The Institute works with designers, illustrators, editors, and cartographers on a project-by-project basis. Enquiries are welcome via the contact page.
Review and press copies are available for journalists and established publications. Please get in touch with your outlet details.
A press pack containing approved images for editorial use is available to download above. For anything beyond those assets, please contact us directly.
