The sample
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The first pages, as text. Helen Brooks is an invented narrator; her answers are set exactly the way yours will be.
Helen was my grandmother on my mother's side. She died the spring before I was born, so I never met her, and I think my mother wanted the name back in the house. My father never once used it. To him I was Nell, from the day I came home from the hospital, and he was the only one who ever called me that.
Bellefonte sat in a valley with hills all around it, and the whole place ran on the limestone. There were quarries north of town and you could hear them some mornings, a sort of thud you felt more than heard. The main street had the courthouse at the top with the big columns, and going down from there the bank, Hoover's drugstore, the five and ten, and at the bottom the spring, which is where the town got its name. The water came up out of the ground clear and so cold it hurt your teeth. My father used to say you could set your watch by that spring, that it never changed, and I suppose it hasn't.
In winter the whole valley would fill up with fog and you couldn't see the hills at all, and it felt like the town was the only thing there was.
She was small and quick and she never sat down. I mean that — I can't picture her sitting. She took in sewing, alterations mostly, and she'd have the machine going in the front room at nine at night with the radio on low. She had a way of holding pins in her mouth and still talking to you, and you'd understand her fine.
She wasn't affectionate the way people are now. She didn't say things. But if you were sick she'd sit up with you all night and never mention it after.
My father worked at the quarry from the time he was seventeen until his back gave out. He came home grey — the dust got into everything, his hair, the creases of his hands, and my mother made him wash at the sink in the kitchen before he'd come through.
He was a quiet man but he sang. That's the thing people forget about him. He'd sing in the car, hymns mostly, and he had a good voice and he knew it.
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Helen Brooks is not a real person. She is an example, written to show what a real book looks like: the typesetting, the contents page built from the teller’s own words, and the A5 size ready to print. Everything else is real — this PDF was set by the same generator that will set yours.
Up to six photos per chapter, each with the caption they write, in color on a page of its own, right after the chapter's last answer.
1 of 5
Real pages, laid out by the same program that makes every book. The narrator and the captions are invented; the photos are old ones from our founder's family, shown with their permission.
An old photo of theirs on the cover: they choose it when they finish. These use old photos from our founder’s family, with permission; the names are made up.
Printed from the PDF
Eleanor Price1943a life told word for word
Dorothy Byrne19381 of 8
Three covers fill in as you type. What you type stays on this screen; it isn't sent anywhere.
Covers shown with an example name.
$49 plus sales tax, one payment. The code reaches you by email the moment you pay. Full refund until the code is redeemed, up to 90 days.
