The memoir
The Hundred-Year Book.
Over a year of conversations, the story of your life and the reasons behind it become a memoir, written in your own voice and bound by hand to last a hundred years.
Why a hundred years
Researchers who study family memory put its limit at about three generations, or roughly a hundred years. Beyond that, a family knows only what someone took the trouble to write down.
What's included
- Twelve monthly conversations with your interviewer, in person or by video.
- A plan for the book, agreed with you at the start.
- Chapters drafted as the conversations unfold, for you to read and approve.
- Six letters in your voice, to be opened by members of the next generation at eighteen, at twenty-one, on their wedding day or at the birth of a first child.
- Your memoir of about 36,000 words, professionally edited and proofread.
- A recording of you reading your favourite passages aloud.
Most authors meet their interviewer once a month. If time is a concern, the conversations can be held fortnightly and the book finished in about six months.
The book itself
- Each book is designed page by page by a book designer, with your photographs placed throughout the story.
- Your photographs are scanned and cleaned up for print. Badly damaged ones can be restored at additional cost, and faces are never altered.
- The book is printed on acid-free archival paper, made to last at least a century.
- It is sewn and bound by hand in cloth, with your name on the spine.
- You receive ten copies, each in its own box.
Your title page
Type a name below to see how your title page might look.
The name shown is an example.
The Hundred-Year Book
of
Margaret Hale
who built Hale & Sons Joinery
Wagga Wagga, 1961 to today
Word & Deed
Pricing
The Hundred-Year Book is priced individually, and we agree a fixed price after our first conversation.
You can pay in monthly instalments over the year, and brothers and sisters often share the cost.