About
A small press, for one reader at a time.
Page Hundred is built on a simple, stubborn idea: that a child's world is worth a book of its own.
There are a great many personalised books in the world. Most of them are the same story with a different name printed inside the cover. A child who reads one of them is not really reading about themselves. They are reading about a stranger who happens to share their name.
We started Page Hundred because we thought children deserved better than that. Not a flashier version of the same idea, but a fundamentally different one. A book written from scratch, around the actual child — the one at the foot of the bed in odd pyjamas, the one who invents words for feelings, the one who insists on the blue spoon and no other.
Children are, it turns out, remarkable. Every one of them is a particular universe of small loyalties, private rituals, inherited phrases, serious fears, and inexplicable obsessions. This universe is usually invisible to the books they are given. We thought one of them, at least, should be made to see it.
A book that is truly theirs is a quiet way of saying: your world is real enough to write down.
A keepsake, not a novelty
We are making books to be kept, not consumed. The paper is chosen for how it ages. The binding is sewn, because sewn books survive being loved. The writing is done slowly, by people, because nothing else produces writing worth reading twice.
Our ambition is to make the kind of book a family still has in a drawer thirty years later — the one somebody picks up at a funeral, or a birthday, or late at night when the house is finally quiet, and reads a few pages of, and puts back, smiling.
Why we don't call this "personalised"
Personalisation, as the word is usually meant, is a shallow thing. A name swapped in. A photograph pasted on. The book underneath is unchanged.
What we do is older than that, and simpler: we write a story about a specific person. That is, by tradition, how most of the best stories came to exist in the first place — someone who loved someone else made them a thing.
A quiet promise
Every Page Hundred book is made once, for one child, and then put away. We don't re-use stories. We don't keep files of "near enough". The book you receive has been written for a specific person, and it will never be made again.
That is the whole idea. It is a little ambitious. It takes time. It is worth it.
Make one for a child you know.
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