The thing about fathers in families is that the family has, somewhere along the line, decided who he is. He is the one who tells the same joke. He is the one who fixed the car that one time. He is the one with the chair, the one with the opinions about the dishwasher, the one who has, since 1994, refused to admit that he was lost when he said he was not lost. The family has settled on him, the way a family settles on weather: known, predictable, useful, and slightly underestimated.
This is a piece about giving him a book that pushes back, gently, on that settled portrait. About what a personalized book for dad actually is, what to put in one, and why so many of the books the press has made for fathers end up, on arrival, with the father going quiet for a longer beat than the family expected. We have made many of these books. The pattern is consistent.
A personalized book for dad does the thing a tie cannot.
The category of dad gifts is a category of practical objects with sentimental aftertaste. The tie. The wallet. The whisky tumbler engraved with a date he already remembers. The grill tool with a wooden handle. These are not bad gifts. They are gifts that say I noticed what you use. They are not gifts that say I noticed who you are. The difference matters more, with fathers, than with most categories of recipient.
A personalized book for dad is the second kind of gift. It is a thirty-two-page hardcover storybook, illustrated for one reader, written around the small specific things only the family would know to mention. It does not ask the father to perform a reaction. He can put it down and read it later, alone, which is what fathers tend to do with anything that lands; the family does not need to be present at the moment of impact. The book waits well. He will read it twice in private before the family hears about it.
A personalized book for dad, at sundayfawn, is a single hardcover storybook written for one named reader. Every book takes a few weeks from order to ship. It has a matte printed cover. After the book ships, the file is closed and the press is reset. There is no second copy of any book the press makes.
What to write in a custom book for a father, when you don't know what to say.
The hardest part of a father book, almost always, is starting. Fathers in many families have a kind of public character: the chair, the joke, the opinion about the dishwasher. The public character is the surface. It is also where the family's writing tends to begin, and stay. He worked hard. He provided. He was always there. These sentences are true. They are also exactly the sentences a thousand other families have written, and the father, reading them, hears the borrowed phrasing the way you hear a hymn at a wedding you have been to before.
The trick is to write at the level the family does not say out loud.
Try this. Sit down for ten minutes. Think of three things about your father that the family knows but does not bother saying because they assume everyone already knows. The way he closes the back door three times to make sure. The way he stands at the kitchen counter to drink his morning coffee, never sitting down. The fact that he has been driving the same route to work for thirty years and could, if pressed, describe every set of traffic lights in order. The fact that he keeps a particular pen in the visor of the car, has kept that pen for years, and would notice immediately if anyone moved it. The fact that he hums when he reads. The fact that he sighs in a particular way when he opens the dishwasher and finds it full.
These are not big observations. They are the small specific things the family knows without having decided to know them. They are the difference between a book that says who he is and a book that recognises him.
Three of these, set into a thirty-two-page storybook, will land harder than any tribute speech. The family knows him in the way it knows the weather: in small specific patterns. Write down the patterns.
A book for him is a book for the man, not the role.
A note on framing, because it is the thing the press most often coaches buyers through. The temptation, when commissioning a book for a father, is to make the book about being a father. The book becomes a chronicle of the role: the early mornings, the school runs, the years of being relied upon. These are real and the father lived them and they are also, in some sense, the part of him the family has already thanked him for.
The book lands harder when it is, instead, about the man. The driver. The reader. The maker of the same sandwich on Saturdays. The amateur of one particular thing he has been quietly serious about for thirty years. The bird he watches at the feeder. The film he has rewatched eleven times and still cries at the same line in. The book about the man is a book the father did not know was available to him as a gift, because he has spent the last few decades being addressed as the role. The book about the man arrives, and he is, briefly, addressed as the person he was before the role and is still, underneath it.
The studio defaults to this framing. The writing is in the third person, and the father appears in the book as a named character with specific habits, not as a generic figure of fatherhood. This is the single most important thing the press has learned about books for fathers.
How to brief the press in ten minutes.
You do not write the storybook. You answer the dad brief, which is a small set of questions, and Juno (the in-house storyteller) writes the book from your answers in the tone you choose.
The questions are:
- Who is the book for, and what do you call him? Use the name the family actually uses. Not the formal name. The one the children use.
- Three specifics no one outside the family would know. The way he closes the back door. The way he stands at the counter. The pen in the visor. Specifics. Not adjectives.
- One ordinary Saturday. Describe it. Hour by hour. Not a holiday. Not the wedding. A Saturday you could draw a map of.
- One thing he is quietly serious about. The bird at the feeder. The grain of a particular wood. The way to make a cup of tea. Whatever the thing is that the family teases him about, and that he is, secretly, glad he is teased about.
- One sentence he has said often. Not the famous one. The throwaway one. The line he says before he leaves a room, or the thing he mutters at the news.
- Tone preference: warm and plain, or warm and slightly dry. For father books, slightly dry is more often the right choice. Fathers, generally, do not want to be eulogised. They want to be seen.
The studio writes a thirty-two-page hardcover storybook from these answers, in in the studio's style. The book is matte-printed on the cover, hardcover. A few weeks from the brief to the door.
What it costs, and why it does not change.
The book is There is only one price. It does not change with the length of the brief, the complexity of the paintings, the number of Saturdays, the number of habits, or the tone the buyer requests. The press makes one custom hardcover book at a time, and a single fair number works better than several confusing ones.
The economics of an edition of one are not the economics of a print run. The press does not gain anything by selling the same book twice; the press cannot, by definition, sell the same book twice. Every book that ships is the only one of its kind, and the price is the same for every father, every Saturday, every pen in every visor.
Father's Day, retirement, sixtieth, just because.
Most father books are commissioned for Father's Day, retirement, a sixtieth or seventieth birthday, or the year a particular father got well. These are good reasons. The press has also made many books that arrived on no occasion at all, sent by an adult son or daughter who had, on a Tuesday, finally read a piece like this one and decided to write down the three small specifics before forgetting which Saturday it was.
The undated books, in our experience, land hardest. A book that arrives on Father's Day is read as a Father's Day gift; it is one of several objects on a table that day. A book that arrives on a Tuesday in March, with no date on it, is read as something else entirely. The father, generally, takes it into the room with the chair, and the family does not see him again for an hour.
If the book is for a particular date, count back five weeks. The brief takes ten minutes. The book takes a few weeks. Add a week of grace. The press does not rush the binding. The print needs to set. The book waits well, and so does the father.
Common questions
Q: What is a personalized book for dad?
A: A personalized book for dad is a single hardcover storybook written for one named reader: your father. At sundayfawn, every book is bound once, takes a few weeks from order to ship, is matte-printed, and bound only once. It is built from three to five specifics only the family would know to give.
Q: What do you write in a personalized book for a father?
A: Write specifics, not adjectives. Not hardworking but the way he closes the back door three times to make sure. Not patient but the way he stands at the kitchen counter to drink his coffee, never sitting down. The studio writes the storybook from those specifics. The brief is five questions and takes about ten minutes.
Q: Is a custom book a good Father's Day gift?
A: Yes. Father's Day buyers should order five weeks before the third Sunday in June. The press also believes, quietly, that a book arriving on an ordinary day, with no date attached, lands harder than one that is expected. Either is fine. Both have worked.
Q: How is this different from a typical personalized gift book?
A: A typical personalized gift book from a mass producer is a template with a name swapped in. The pages are the same for every buyer; only the name changes. A bespoke storybook from the press is the opposite: every book is a new story written from the specifics the family gave, and bound only once. The file closes after the book ships.
Q: How long does it take and what does it cost?
A: A few weeks from order to ship. Hardcover, edition of one, matte cover, with a colophon at the back. There is no faster tier and no second copy.
— A storybook no one else has ever read.