The Hour Book. The hour they arrived.

Every named child has an hour. The hour they arrived. The weather the city had that morning. The headline on the paper. The song on the kitchen radio. The first call you made. The first sentence you said out loud. These specifics exist, briefly, in the family's working memory and then they begin to fade. The Hour Book is the artefact that holds them — a hardcover storybook keyed to the hour one named baby was born.

The book is not a baby book in the photo-album sense. It is a storybook. The story is structured around the hour. The first chapter is the morning. The second chapter is the call. The third is the first song. The painted illustration on the half-title page is the sky that day, in the city the baby was born in. The specifics turn an occasion into a literary object on the shelf.

You write us a brief that contains the data. The baby's name. The hour and date. The city. One song that was playing in the house that week. The first thing you said when you saw them. One friend who came to the hospital. Juno writes the story from those, and we research the weather and the headline of the day. The book is illustrated for this one book for that one reader.

The cover is matte-printed with the baby's name and the hour. The colophon at the back lists the date, the time, and the hospital or home. The book is hardcover, perfect-bound, in a plain box, with a colophon at the back. It ships in roughly two weeks. The family will read it on the first birthday and then again on the eighteenth. The child will read it themselves, eventually, and they will know what hour they arrived.

The book is the only copy of itself. The file closes after it ships. There is no second printing for the grandparents — they get photographs; the child gets the book. There is one Hour Book per named child, and the press is reset. Twenty years from now the child will read it out loud at their own wedding rehearsal dinner, and the family will know which hour the book is talking about.