sundayfawnsundayfawn

The Why Library

A small library of why.

Readers of any age pay closer attention to a page that knows their name. Psychologists call it the self-reference effect. We just made it personal — and bound it once.

Booksellers have known the shape of this for two hundred years. The reader who finds themselves on the page reads further into the night, comes back to the book more often, and remembers it longer. The research literature has been quietly documenting the effect since Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker first measured it in Calgary in 1977. The literature has not changed its mind. We have, for several years now, been making books on those terms — written for one named reader, illustrated, bound, and shipped once. The library below is the long footnote behind the press. Eight short essays on the research, the heritage, and the quiet arguments for a book made for one. Read in any order.

The eight chapters.

  1. i.
    The self-reference effect, and why a named page is read further.

    How a 1977 paper from Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker explained, almost by accident, why a book with your name in it lives in memory differently from a book without.

  2. ii.
    Personalisation, narrative transportation, and the page that holds attention.

    What Green and Brock's transportation theory, and the personalised-reading research from the Open University, tell us about a page that holds attention longer than a generic page.

  3. iii.
    Why children remember some books and not others.

    Identity-anchored memory, the self-memory system of Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, and the small set of books a person carries into adulthood.

  4. iv.
    The keepsake tradition.

    Two hundred years of gift books — from the Regency annuals to the Kelmscott Press to the modern hardcover — and what the anthropology of the durable gift tells us about what survives a lifetime.

  5. v.
    Edition of one — what it actually means.

    The phrase comes from printmaking, where it is taken literally. The press takes it literally too.

  6. vi.
    The bookbinder's craft — perfect-bound and matte-printed, one book at a time.

    From William Morris's Kelmscott Press to David McConnell Smyth's 1879 patent to the modern single-book studio. A short history of bookbinding for one reader.

  7. vii.
    Written for one, not for many.

    A quiet argument for the bespoke book. The economics, the ethics, and the page that has only ever known one reader.

The library is a long footnote.

Everything in the library is held, eventually, in a hardcover storybook, illustrated illustrated for this one book, bound once, with a colophon at the back, and shipped in a plain box. We do not write the library to sell the book. We write it because the book deserves a library behind it. Read the essays. Disagree with the press, if you like. Then — if it suits you — write us a brief.

See what we make

a storybook no one else has ever read.

The press, indexed

Browse the full catalogue