The grandparent in your family already has everything that can be wrapped. The drawer with the scarves. The shelf with the mugs. The framed grandchild photographs that have, slowly, replaced every other object on the mantel. They have a stack of cards from the last twenty birthdays, half of them unopened in a tin. Whatever you are about to buy them, they probably already own a quieter version of it, and they will accept the new one with the same grace they accepted the last one.
This is a piece about how to give them something else. About what a personalized book for a grandparent actually is, what to put in one, and six small specific ideas that do not feel like a card from a chain pharmacy. Six because three is too few and a list of ten begins to read like a magazine.
A personalized book for a grandparent is not a tribute speech. It is a held thing.
The mistake people make with a gift for a grandparent is treating it like a eulogy in advance. A grandparent receives, in their last decade, an extraordinary number of small tributes: the framed words, the engraved tiles, the printed canvas with the years of birth and a blank where one year will eventually go. These are kind. They are also, in their accumulation, oddly impersonal. They have the same furniture: beloved, cherished, the matriarch, the patriarch, forever in our hearts. Anyone could have written them, which is in some sense the problem. Anyone did.
A personalized book for a grandparent is not in that family of objects. It is a storybook. There is a plot, of a sort. There is a hero, who is the grandparent, named on every page. There are scenes that are particular: the corner of the kitchen they always stood in, the way they cut an apple at the table, the song they hum without realising. The book is a hardcover. It sits on a side table for a year and then on a shelf for thirty.
A personalized book for a grandparent, at sundayfawn, is a single hardcover storybook written for one named reader. Every book is bound once, takes a few weeks from order to ship, and is built around the small specific things only the family knew. It has a matte printed cover. After the book ships, the file is closed and the press is reset.
Six ideas for a personalized book for a grandparent, in order of difficulty.
These are not categories the press has invented. They are the six framings the studio sees most often when the family writes in to commission a custom hardcover book. They run from the most straightforward to the most ambitious.
1. The day-in-the-life.* Pick one day the grandparent already has. A Saturday in summer, the one where they make a particular breakfast, weed a particular bed, sit on a particular bench at five in the afternoon. The book follows the day from morning to dusk. There is no event. That is the point. The gift is the act of noticing that the ordinary day was, all along, the thing worth setting down. The family that asks for this kind of book is usually the family that has finally realised the grandparent is the routine, and the routine is the love.
2. The migration story. For the grandparents who came from somewhere else. The book is not a documentary. It is a storybook version of the long journey: the town they left, the meal their mother made the night before they left it, the small specific objects that made the trip, the year they finally said home* about somewhere new. Families who have asked for this book have, almost always, said the same thing: nobody in the family had ever asked the grandparent to tell the story slowly. The book asks for them.
3. The family they made. This one is structurally simple. The grandparent is at the centre of a constellation of names: children, partners, grandchildren, the dog. The book moves outward through them. Each person on a page or two, illustrated with one specific thing only the grandparent would know to say about them. The trick is the specificity. Likes football is not enough. Plays football badly on purpose so he can lose to his daughter* is the sentence the book is looking for.
4. The thing they made.* For the grandparent who is a maker. The dressmaker. The gardener. The bread-bakers and the cabinet-makers and the watercolourists and the woman who, for forty years, made a single particular cake for every birthday in the family. The book follows the making. There are paintings of the tools, the hands, the unfinished and the finished thing. Many of these books end up on the shelf where the tools are kept.
5. The advice book. This one is harder, and it is the one that lands hardest. The studio interviews the family (siblings, cousins, the buyer) for the small specific things the grandparent has said over the years that the family has not forgotten. Not the big speeches. The throwaway lines. Never trust a man who runs everywhere. Always carry an apple. If it takes two hours, take it the long way.* The book is a small collection of these, with one painted scene for each, and the grandparent's name on the colophon. It reads, to the grandparent, like being recognised.
6. The book about a particular Sunday in 1968.* The hardest, and the one we love best. The family picks a single day from the grandparent's life, sometimes long before the family existed, and the book is set entirely inside it. The wedding morning. The day they bought the house. The afternoon they met. The studio paints the day as if it were a fable: the weather of it, the clothes, the room, the music. These books take the longest to brief and the shortest to read. They are usually given without warning, on a Tuesday, after a meal, and the family does not speak for several minutes after they are opened.
What to actually write to the studio when you brief the book.
You do not have to write the storybook. You write the grandparent brief, which is a small set of questions, and the studio writes the book around your answers. The brief takes ten minutes. The studio (Juno, the in-house storyteller) sets the answers down on the page in a tone you choose.
The questions, in order:
- Who is the book for? What do they prefer to be called? The book uses the name they actually answer to. Not their formal name. The one the grandchildren use.
- Three specifics no one outside the family would know. The corner of the kitchen they stand in. The mug they prefer. The way they hum a particular song slightly off-key.
- One sentence they have said often. Not the famous one. The throwaway one. The line they say without thinking, that the family has, without thinking, memorised.
- One ordinary day. Describe it the way a documentary would: hour by hour, room by room. Not the holiday. Not the wedding. The Saturday.
- Who else is in the story? Names, in order, with one specific thing about each.
These five answers, given honestly, are enough material for a thirty-two-page hardcover storybook. The studio asks no other personal questions. We do not need photographs of the grandparent (the paintings are not portraits; they are illustrations in the studio's style). We do not need anything from the grandparent themselves. The book is, by design, a surprise.
What it costs, and what it weighs.
The price has held steady since the press began. There is one edition, one copy, hardcover only, matte-printed, signed. The book is made one at a time. The price does not change with length, paint complexity, or how many family members appear in the brief. The press did the math once and committed.
What the book weighs, physically, surprises most buyers when they unpack it. It is heavier than the wrapping suggests. It is the weight of a small hardback novel. The grandparent, when they open it, often holds it for a few seconds before they read it. Long enough to register that the object is real, and that someone made it. The family that watches this happens almost always describes the same moment afterwards in almost the same words.
A small note on timing.
A few weeks from brief to ship. Plan for that. The book is built one at a time and we do not promise faster. The brief itself takes ten minutes; the writing takes the studio four or five days; the painting takes ten; the printing and binding take the rest. International shipping adds a few days on the back end.
If the gift is for a particular birthday, anniversary, or family gathering, count back five weeks from the date and brief the book then. The grandparents we have written books for have not, so far, complained that the book arrived too early to enjoy.
Common questions
Q: What is a personalized book for a grandparent?
A: A personalized book for a grandparent is a single hardcover storybook written for one named reader, whether your grandmother, grandfather, or whichever grandparent you are writing for. At sundayfawn, every book is bound once, takes a few weeks, is matte-printed, and is bound only once. The book is built from specifics only the family would know to give.
Q: How is this different from a memory book or a family history?
A: A memory book is a blank book the family fills in afterwards. A family history is a researched document. A bespoke storybook is neither. It is a written, illustrated, hardcover narrative with the grandparent as the named hero of a story the studio writes from the brief you give. The book arrives finished.
Q: What do you write in a personalized book for a grandparent if you do not know what to say?
A: Write specifics, not adjectives. Not kind but the way she peels an apple in one strip. Not generous but the song he hums when he thinks no one can hear. The studio takes the specifics and writes the story around them. The brief is five questions and takes about ten minutes.
Q: Is a personalized book a good 80th or 90th birthday gift?
A: Yes. The press has made many of both. A hardcover book sits on a shelf for the next twenty years and grows heavier with each reading. It is a steadier gift than flowers, which last a week, or jewelry, which a grandparent of eighty often already owns more of than they want.
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.