Is every sundayfawn book really one of a kind?

Yes. Every book is written and illustrated around someone real, with room for the cast that belongs beside them, then made once as a hardcover storybook.

How much does a sundayfawn book cost?

The hardcover storybook is ships worldwide.

How long does it take to receive my book?

Books are illustrated, written, printed and bound in small batches and typically arrive within a few days.

Do you ship internationally?

Yes — sundayfawn ships worldwide on carbon-neutral routes.

What do I need to make a book?

A name, a photograph, and any other cast members you want in the story. A few true details are enough to begin.

Chapter vi · The Why Library

The book, made by hand.

A bookbinder's bench in the late afternoon. Boards stacked at the left, archival thread on a small spool, a bone folder darkened by years of pressed creases.

Kelmscott, 1891 — the private press as protest.

William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press at Hammersmith in 1891. He was sixty, a year from the end of a long career, and the Press was, by his own account, a response to what industrial publishing had become: cheap, ill-bound novels printed in tens of thousands on thin paper, glued at the spine, falling apart in a decade. Morris set out to make books that were, in his phrase, beautiful in themselves — hand-set type, dampened paper, vegetable inks, vellum bindings. The Press produced fifty-three titles in seven years. The world it set out to reform did not reform; the practice has continued anyway.

T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, who had bound for Morris, founded the Doves Press in 1900 with the typographer Emery Walker. The Doves was smaller and stricter than Kelmscott — a single typeface, the Doves type, used for every book; no ornament; spare bindings in undyed vellum. Cobden-Sanderson, in his late writings, argued that the book is the highest object a press can aim at because it can be made entire by hand, by one or two craftsmen, in editions small enough to know each copy. The Doves Press closed in 1916. Its books remain, and are still bound the way they were bound.

Smyth, 1879 — the sewn signature, and why it opens flat.

The perfect-bound binding takes its name from David McConnell Smyth, an Irish-American inventor who patented the book-sewing machine in 1879 (U.S. Patent No. 213,376). The method had existed by hand for centuries, but Smyth's machine made it economically possible for trade books. Each folded signature of pages is sewn separately, through the fold, with archival thread; the signatures are then joined to their neighbours at the spine. The finished textblock opens flat, because the spine flexes at every sewn join. Edith Diehl, in her 1946 reference work Bookbinding: Its Background and Technique, calls it the binding method for any book intended to outlast its first owner.

The alternative is perfect binding, in which the spine is glued without sewing. It is cheaper, faster, and entirely sufficient for a paperback meant to be read once and discarded. It fails in time, as the glue dries and the pages release. A perfect-bound book fails only when the archival thread itself disintegrates, which on archival paper under indoor conditions takes a great many decades. This is, in the most boring possible sense, the difference between a book that lasts and a book that does not. The studio sews every book it makes by this method, on the same principle as Diehl.

The cover, and the one reader.

The cover lettering is matte-printed in archival ink — the reader’s name set in the press’s house typography and calibrated to read calmly in the hand. The cover does not fade or lift, and it ages well on a shelf. The cover is finalised for one book and the file is closed after the book ships.

One cover, one reader, one edition. The file closes after the book ships.

View a sample →

The book, made by hand.

Kelmscott, 1891 — the private press as protest.

Smyth, 1879 — the sewn signature, and why it opens flat.

The cover, and the one reader.

The press, indexed