Chapter vii · The Why Library

Written for one. Not for many.

Most things made today are made for everyone. The book on the bestseller table was edited toward the broadest possible reader. The personalised gift book on the next shelf was templated.

The arithmetic, in two columns.

There are honest products in both columns. The mass-market book is the form by which most reading happens, and the press has no quarrel with it. The personalised template book — a single story, name dropped into a field, sold thousands of times — is also honest, on its own terms. What it is not is a book that has only ever known one reader. The economics of the template depend on the underlying intellectual property being re-sold many times over. The economics of a press that closes its files after each book depend on the opposite arithmetic. One buyer. One reader. One copy. Then reset.

The research literature is faintly relevant here, although the argument does not rest on it. The self-reference effect (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977) and the narrative-transportation findings of Green and Brock (2000) both predict that a story written specifically around a named reader is read further and remembered longer than a template with the reader's name inserted. The Kucirkova group's work on personalised reading confirms the prediction. None of this is the press's claim, exactly. The press's claim is smaller: a book written for one named reader is a different object than one written for all of them.

The ethics of the file that closes.

When the buyer of a template personalised book completes the order, the data they have entered — the names, the relationships, the photograph they uploaded — does not stop being the company's. It sits in the system. It can be used to retarget the buyer later, or aggregated and sold to brokers. This is a fact, not an accusation; it is how the form is built. When a book is made here, the conversation that produced it is archived for our own record and is not re-used. The cover artwork is discarded; the file is closed; the press is reset. The data of one buyer ends with one book.

Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman (2008), argued at book length that the ethics of making are inseparable from the ethics of attention — that to make one thing well is, among other things, to attend to one thing well. The press has found this to be operationally true. A book that has to be written from scratch, illustrated for one reader, matte-printed on a die cut once, sewn with a colophon at the back is a book that cannot be made inattentively. The pace of the work prevents it. This is not a moral claim about the buyer or the giver. It is a description of what one good thing, made slowly, looks like.

The page that has only ever known one reader.

When the named reader opens the book, the page they are reading is the only copy of that page that has ever been printed. The kitchen described in it is their kitchen. The dog under the table is their dog. The grandmother who put a sugar lump in her tea is their grandmother. The page knows them in a way no other page they will ever read can know them, because no other page has been written for them in particular. This is, in the end, the entire claim. A book written for one named reader is a different object than one written for all of them.

The book is the only one of its kind on Earth. It will be, on a shelf in 2076, either still there or not. There is no fallback. That is the point.

See what we make →

Cited.

• Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N. A., & Kirker, W. S. (1977). Self-reference and the encoding of personal information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(9), 677–688. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.35.9.677
• Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–721. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701
• Mauss, M. (1925). Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques. L'Année Sociologique, n.s., 1, 30–186.
• Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107(2), 261–288. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.107.2.261

a storybook no one else has ever read.