Inside the book

Their life, in a book you can hold.

Their stories in their own words, bound in linen, with every old photo restored.

Give the gift Look inside

The hardcover memoir with a deep red linen cover on a table

Sample

An open memoir showing a chapter with a restored family photograph

What you’re holding

Made like the books people keep.

The cover: Hardcover, wrapped in linen cloth.
The title: Their name, stamped in gold foil.
The pages: Full colour, all the way through.
The photos: Every one restored and printed large.
The words: Theirs, gently edited. A real person reads every book before it prints.
The length: As long as their story. There’s always room for a second volume.

Sample

Turn the pages of Peggy’s book.

Peggy is our sample storyteller. Her book is laid out the way yours will be: chapters built around Wren’s questions, her words, her photos.

Peggy

Now, a dollar was a lot of money in 1959. Doris, who had been pouring coffee at the Starlight since before the war, took one look at it and said, “Honey, that boy is either rich or sweet on you, and he doesn’t look rich.” She was right. He had cardboard in his shoes. I found that out later.

His name was Walter James Albright. He was twenty, studying to be an engineer, and he was driving his uncle’s Ford back from Columbus when the wiper quit on him. That’s the only reason he stopped. If that wiper had held out another eleven miles, I’d have married somebody else, and I don’t like to think about who.

I was so nervous I spilled his second cup into the saucer. He drank it out of the saucer anyway, and I thought, oh. I like him.

Walt always told it differently. In his version he stopped because he saw me through the window, and by our fortieth anniversary the window had gotten bigger. I let him tell it that way at parties. But it was the wiper.

Coffee, black, no sugar

He came back the next night, and the next. On the fourth night I told him if he wanted to keep drinking coffee he’d have to take me to the pictures. We saw Some Like It Hot. He laughed so loud the usher shined a flashlight on us.

Two years later he asked me to marry him in that same booth, with a ring he’d been paying off at Elder-Beerman a dollar a week. I said yes before he got to the end of the question. Doris cried harder than my mother did.

Peggy

They played “Moon River” for our first dance. Walt stepped on my foot twice and whispered, “I’ll get better at this.” He did, eventually. It took him about thirty years.

We left the hall in his uncle’s Ford, the same one with the bad wiper, with tin cans my cousins had tied to the bumper. We made it as far as Springfield before the radiator boiled over, and we sat on the side of the road in our wedding clothes waiting for it to cool down. I didn’t mind one bit.

Peggy

Tommy and Anne ‘helping’ with Thanksgiving pies, 1968.

Saturdays were pies, Sundays were church and pot roast, and every other day was just getting everybody out the door with two shoes on. Walt left for the plant at seven. I walked Tommy to kindergarten with Anne on my hip, and by nine o’clock I’d usually cried once and laughed twice. That was a good day. Some days it went the other way around.

Flour on everything

Some nights, after everybody was asleep, I’d sit in that yellow kitchen with the last of the coffee and the radio turned down low. Walt would come in and ask what I was doing. “Nothing,” I’d say. It was the best part of the day.

The night the men walked on the moon, Walt woke the kids up and we all sat on the carpet in our pajamas in front of the television. Anne fell asleep in my lap before Armstrong came down the ladder. Tommy has been talking about it ever since.

Anne says she remembers it too. She was asleep. I was there.

When Anne started kindergarten I had a quiet house for the first time in six years, and I hated it. I’d vacuum the same rug twice. One morning I was standing at the sink and I said out loud, to nobody, “Well, Peg, now what?” That was the first time I thought about going back to school.