The first wedding anniversary is paper. That is the traditional list, and it sounds like the easiest brief of the lot until you try to buy against it.
Almost everything paper is designed to be temporary. A card is paper. So is a print you have to find a wall for, and a voucher, and a folded thing with a poem in it. A card given in June is behind the clock by August and in the bin by Christmas, and nobody minds, because a card is a card. Paper is the material the tradition names and the one most likely to be recycled inside the year.
What makes a paper gift last
It has to be written in, for a start, because paper that is only looked at is just another picture in the house. Once it is full it has to be worth keeping, so the outside needs to be an object in its own right and not packaging. And it has to be worth opening again, because paper is where people put down what they thought at the time.
A notebook manages all of that. It is paper bound in vegan leather, with the thing that matters cut into the cover by a laser instead of printed on top. No ink sits on the surface to lift at a corner, so the book that comes out of a drawer in fifteen years still says what it said.
The covers that suit one year in
The anniversary covers all do the same job: they take one fact the two of you already own and make it the picture on the front.
Two hands is a line drawing of two hands with their little fingers linked and your names lettered along the forearms, so the names are part of the drawing instead of sitting beneath it. Short forms read best along an arm. It names no occasion at all, which is one way to buy it.
The other way is dated: the same drawing and the same two names, with 1ST ANNIVERSARY or ONE YEAR MARRIED over the date you married.
Your place, mapped draws any spot on earth with its name and coordinates beneath: the register office, the pub, the street you rented that first flat on. Your sky, charted takes the same place plus a date and draws the night exactly as it was above it.
A handwritten note starts from paper you already have, which is the most literal answer to a paper anniversary here. Photograph the card they wrote you last year, or the vows, and the handwriting alone is lifted onto the cover, leaving the paper and the shine of the biro behind. Portrait and caption sets a photograph above one line of your own, usually a date and two names. And if the wording is the whole present, a poem for them turns what you tell it about the year into a short verse for you to edit before anything is engraved.
What goes on the cover, and what goes inside
Put the fact on the front and the feeling on the first page. A notebook is opened in meetings and left on kitchen tables, so two names and a date is plenty for a cover; the paragraph you want to say belongs inside, in your own hand.
If you put a year on the cover, put a date under it. "Five years" on its own stops being true in twelve months, and a cover cannot be corrected. "1st anniversary" above the date you married names one particular day and stays accurate forever, which is why the two dated covers put the words and the date together. Say both, or neither. And spell the month out, because numerals alone get read differently in different countries.
Anything private can go on the back. Secret message engraves one short line small in the bottom corner of the back cover, with nothing on the front to explain it, and most people who pick the book up never turn it over.
Cotton, clocks, and the other lists
The lists disagree, which is where people get talked out of a good present. Paper is the first anniversary on the traditional list; cotton is the second and leather the third, so anybody telling you cotton is the first year has slipped a row. The modern lists, which are a twentieth-century retail invention and not an old custom, put a clock at one year. None of it is binding, and paper has the nicest logic behind it.
Ordering
£17.99 plus £2.75 postage, engraved to order and dispatched within one working day, Monday to Thursday. The covers that start from a photograph take a moment longer, because the picture is redrawn before anything is engraved.
An anniversary is a fixed date nobody gets to move, so order a clear week ahead and not on the day. That week is also your margin for a spelling you have gone off: every design shows the finished cover, engraved, before you pay, and two names means twice the chance of a typo. Some colours show the engraving more boldly than others, which matters where the names are written into the artwork itself, so check the preview on a few, and here is what the laser actually does to the cover.
More at anniversary gifts by occasion and the wedding and engagement covers, which include Things to do before we say I do for the year before the first. There is more on buying for two people at once, and the gift guide sorts everything by who it is for.