Milestone birthday notebooks

Personalised A5 vegan-leather notebooks, £17.99

These treat forty as a chapter, and set it like one: the age across the cover as a chapter heading, a rule beneath it, and the name of the person it belongs to. Eleven designs: one for each of the birthdays people really mark, one that says the best is yet to come and leaves the age smaller, and one for the friends who still quote the show.

A birthday card is printed and thrown away in March. This is cut into the hide by a laser in-house, on a book nobody makes until you have ordered it, and the age, the name and the word above the number are all fields you fill in: type them and the preview redraws, so the cover you approve is the cover that goes to the laser. A birthday will not move for anybody, so check the delivery details below in good time.

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Free standard delivery on orders over £35. Every service, price and dispatch day is set out on Delivery and returns.

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Turning something else?

Any age can be engraved, not just the nine below. Type the one you need and we will open the closest design with your number already on the cover.

Age or year1 to 9999Open it

The round numbers, and everybody else

The ages with a page of their own are the ones people mark, which is why they exist as their own covers rather than as a number in a box. But the number IS a box on every one of them, so a twenty-fifth, a forty-fifth or a ninety-ninth is the same cover with your figure on it and nothing lost or improvised. If the age is not on the list, use the panel above the grid: type the number you need and it opens the closest cover with your figure already set on it, which saves you opening a 40 and working out for yourself that the 40 is editable.

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Chapter or Vol., and why anyone cares

Every milestone cover toggles between Chapter and Vol., and people turn out to be firm about which one they want. Chapter reads as a life still being written and suits the ages where that is the flattering thing to imply. Vol. reads as a body of work and suits the ages where the joke is the length of it. Underneath sits a rule and then the name, which is the part that stops the cover being about a number and starts it being about a person. There is a cover that takes the other approach entirely: it keeps the age small, gives the largest type on the cover to the promise that the best is yet to come, and sets initials at the foot, which is the one to buy when the age is not something to draw attention to.

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Whose name, and how much of it

A first name almost always beats a full one here, because the age is already carrying the weight and two long words fight each other. A nickname works if the present is from somebody entitled to use it and reads oddly if it is from a whole family. For a present handed over in front of relatives, think about who else will read it: the framed cover with three lines of your own is where the friends who still quote the show end up, and it is very funny to four people and baffling to everybody at the table. Use the preview to see the finished cover with the real words on it before you decide which room it is going to be opened in.

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