Old letters, a diary, a box of photographs — into one book.
We cannot read handwriting. Say that first, because it decides everything else on this page: no scanner reliably reads your grandmother’s 1947 copperplate, and a book built on a machine’s guess at it would be full of small, humiliating errors. You do not need to type out every letter. You need to give us the three or four that carry a story — transcribed, or described in a paragraph — and one line for each photograph that matters. We turn that paper into a full-length book.
Text-first · you approve it first · short ~$19 · full novella ~$29
Somebody has to decide what happens to the paper.
It is usually a shoebox, or a biscuit tin, or a bin bag that got rescued from a skip and put in a spare room in 2019. Inside: forty letters in one hand you half recognise, a diary with three years missing, a bundle of photographs with nothing written on the back, and a telegram somebody kept for a reason nobody now remembers.
The paper is not going to last. It is also too specific to throw away — a 1962 letter about a roof, a wedding, a strike, a baby — and too fragmented to read as a story on its own. What people want, and what almost nothing on the market provides, is the thing in between: the story the letters are evidence of, written out properly, with the good lines quoted exactly as they were written.
That is what this page sells. Not a scanning service, not a photo-book printer, not a scrapbook with stickers. A book of 8,000 to 25,000 words in which the letters are the source material and the book is the argument they add up to.
What to do with a box of letters.
Five steps, in order, and the first three can be done at a kitchen table in an afternoon. This is the part people ask about on forums, so it is written to be useful whether or not you ever order anything from us.
By sender, then by decade
Two piles first: who wrote it, and roughly when. Do not read them yet. The order of the letters is the spine of the book, and you cannot see it while you are crying over one of them.
Flat, in daylight, one at a time
Phone camera, no flash, on a table by a window. One letter per frame, whole page, corners in shot. Do this before anything else — it is cheap insurance against a leak, a move, or a house clearance.
Only the three or four that carry a story
Not all forty. The one about the crossing, the one about the engagement, the one written the week after the funeral. Type those out as written, typos and all. Summarise the rest in a sentence each.
One line for each person
“Eileen — my mother’s sister, ran the shop in Kilkee, never married.” That line is what stops a chapter reading like a list of strangers with initials.
What is the book about?
One person’s life, the relationship the letters record, or the family across three generations. Pick one. A book that tries to be all three reads like an index.
When you have done that, you own something no archive has: a legible, dated, named record of forty pieces of paper, in your own handwriting on a laptop, that will still be readable when the originals are not. Whether it becomes a book here or sits in a folder for your children, that afternoon was the work that mattered.
A letters book is not one shape.
Most buyers do not realise they have a choice, and then get a book that does not quite fit the material they own. These are the three shapes, and what each one needs.
One person’s life, from their letters
Best when one hand dominates the box — a mother, a grandfather, an aunt who wrote to everybody. The letters become the milestones and the book fills the years between them. This is the closest thing to a memoir the material can support.
A relationship, in correspondence
Best when the letters are two-way: a courtship, a separation for work or war, an emigration where one stayed behind. The book is then a story with two voices and a natural arc — they meet, they are apart, they are reunited or they are not.
A family across generations
Best when the box holds several hands and a century. Four or five chapters, one per generation, each anchored in the letters that survive from it. This is the shape that suits an executor clearing a whole house rather than a tin.
If you are not sure which one you have, describe the box on the order form in plain words — how many letters, whose hands, which decades, what else is in there. The shape can be decided from that description, and it is the first thing we settle.
What we can do with the pictures, and what we can’t.
Text is what becomes prose. A photograph is not: we cannot look at a picture of a woman outside a shop in 1962 and know that the roof had just been replaced, or that the shop was failing, or that she was pregnant and had not told anyone.
So you give us one line per image, and those lines do the work. “Her shop, 1962, the year the roof went.” “The four of them on the wall at Cushendun, the summer before the youngest was born.” One line, dated if you can, named if you know. A dozen of those, and the chapters have the concrete detail that makes a scene feel like a place rather than a stage.
What we cannot do is reproduce them. The book is text. No photographs are printed inside it, no scans are embedded, and nothing is laid out on a page. If what you want is an album of images with captions, a photo-book printer does that better and cheaper, and we would rather point you there than sell you the wrong thing.
What the book gives you instead is the thing an album cannot: the story those pictures were taken during, written out, with the letter quoted in the middle of it where it belongs.
A full-length book, not a keepsake folder.
Either 8,000–10,000 words — about a forty-five-minute read — or 25,000 words across 20 chapters. Written from your material, shaped into chapters, with a beginning and an ending rather than a date order.
Delivered as a PDF and an EPUB, plus a private link with an access code you set. No app, no account, nothing for an eighty-year-old to install. You read the whole book before anyone else does, and you can ask for changes before it goes anywhere.
The feature no photo-book printer offers: quoted lines from the letters are woven into the prose, verbatim. Her actual sentence about the crossing, in her actual words, sitting inside a paragraph that explains what the crossing cost. That is the whole reason this format exists, and it is why the transcribing in step three is worth the hour it takes.
A real excerpt, from a book we published.
Not a sample written for a landing page — this is lifted from a complete published book, word for word; its first two chapters are free to read.
That was the whole trick of the place: write it down. He kept the log on the shelf beneath the lamp, a thick ledger bound in oilcloth, and every morning he entered the hour of the tide, the direction of the wind, the state of the sea, the reading on the barometer that hung beside the door like a patient brown eye.
Three people order this, and none of them are collectors.
Clearing a house, on a deadline
The house has to be sold. There are four boxes of paper and a skip. You are not going to read every letter, but you cannot put them in the skip either. A book is a way of keeping the contents without keeping the boxes — and it is something to send the cousins instead of a group email about the furniture.
Who inherited the tin
You have the letters because nobody else wanted them, and you have read about six. You know there is a story in there — the emigration, the shop, the thing nobody talks about — and you do not have the years it would take to research it properly. This is the shortest route from tin to finished book.
The letters do the work instead
Your mother is alive and entirely uninterested in writing a memoir. She will not fill in a journal and she will not sit for an interview. But she kept every letter her own mother wrote her, and she will talk for an hour if you ask about them. The book gets made from those.
Send the material. We write it. You approve it. You share it.
Four steps, and the third is the one that matters. Nothing is shared until you have read the whole book and said yes.
Paste what you have
The transcribed letters, a sentence for each of the others, the one-line photograph notes, the names, the dates you are sure of. A few minutes of typing, or an evening if the box is large.
We write the book
A complete book drafted from exactly that material — 8,000–10,000 words, or 25,000 words across 20 chapters. Ready in minutes, not weeks, and nothing is invented to fill a gap you left.
You read it first
Every chapter, before anyone else. Dates wrong, a name misspelled, a story the family would rather not see in print — you say so and it changes. Nothing ships on your behalf.
A private link
Send a link that opens in any browser, with an access code you set, plus a PDF and an EPUB for whoever wants to keep one. No app, no account.
Two lengths. One payment. No subscription.
Read the first two chapters free first — the books on the shelf are complete, not samples.
Short book
Full novella
One payment, no subscription, no per-page or per-scan charge. Digital only: PDF, EPUB and a private reader link — we do not print or post books.
These are other people’s private letters.
They were written to one person, not to us, and not to the internet. So: the material you send is used only to write your book. It is never published, never indexed, never used as an example, and never shown to anyone else. Nobody reads your book before you do. You can ask for the letters, the notes and the draft to be deleted after delivery, and they are deleted. The finished book goes out as a private link with an access code you set, not as a public URL — though you should assume that anyone you give the code to can pass it on.
What buyers ask.
Do I have to type out all the letters?
No. Transcribe the three or four that carry a story and summarise the rest in a sentence each. Handwriting recognition is unreliable on old script — the loops, the fading, the crossings-out — so we ask for the material in text rather than pretending a scanner can do it.
Can you include the actual scans in the book?
The book is text. Letters can be quoted word for word, which is usually the part people actually want, and a quoted line lands harder than a photograph of the same line. Photographs are described from your notes, not reproduced, and no image files are printed in the book.
What if the letters are in another language?
Give us the passage and a translation. The translation is what goes into the chapters, so the book reads cleanly, and the original line can sit beside it where it carries something the English does not — an endearment, a joke, the way she signed her name.
Whose book is it — the letter writer’s?
Yours to decide. It can be the life of the person who wrote them, the story of a relationship told through the correspondence, or a family history across three generations. The order form asks which one, and the chapters are shaped accordingly.
How long does it take and what does it cost?
Minutes to draft, not weeks. $19 for 8,000–10,000 words or $29 for a 25,000-word novella across 20 chapters, one payment, and you read the whole thing before anyone else does.
Is my family’s private correspondence safe?
It is used only to write your book. It is never published, never indexed, and nobody reads it before you do. You can have it deleted after delivery, and the finished book is a private link with an access code you set.
Other ways in.
The box is not getting any younger.
Start with three letters and a dozen photograph notes. You read the book before anyone else does.