For your best friend

Best-friend gifts have a way of collapsing into candles, mugs and things that smell nice. After enough birthdays together, none of that says anything. A personalized gift for your best friend does: an illustrated book of your friendship, with your actual faces, your running jokes and the stories only the two of you know.

What goes into the book

You do not need to be a writer. A handful of moments is enough:

• How you met, told the way you actually tell it
• The trip that went wrong and became the story you always retell
• The inside jokes nobody else understands
• The hard year one of you carried the other through

Each moment becomes an illustrated page. From one photo of each of you, you both appear drawn in every scene, and you approve the text and the pages before anything is printed.

For birthdays, weddings, or no reason at all

It works for a milestone birthday, for a wedding speech turned into something they can keep, or simply because eighteen years of friendship deserve a better shelf than a chat history. The hardback comes with your dedication on the first page; if the date is tomorrow, the digital edition is ready in minutes.

Read a finished example first: The Orange Suitcase, eighteen years of friendship carried in one battered suitcase that keeps changing hands. There are more illustrated stories for adults, and the rest of the occasions to give a story.