About this site
- Written by
- The people who make the personalized picture books at Lumora
- Interest
- Direct and commercial. We sell the kind of book this site is about
- Links out
- Libraries, reading charities and standards bodies. Two links to our own site, both listed below
- Built with
- Hand-written HTML and one stylesheet. No frameworks, no trackers, no third-party requests
- Revised
- 13 August 2026
We make personalized picture books for children at Lumora. This site exists because making them turned up a pile of specific, unglamorous findings — about names, faces and languages — that we could not find written down anywhere else.
So read everything here knowing who wrote it. We are not neutral about picture books, and a site that told you it was would be worth less, not more.
What we can promise is narrower and, we think, more useful. Every check on this site works on any book, including ours. Several of the pages are about things we got wrong and had to repair, and one of them is about something we have not repaired yet: in a sweep of our own finished books, whole titles in some European languages turned out to have nobody speaking in them anywhere. That is still true today, and it is on the front page under a red mark rather than buried here.
The rule we set ourselves
A check that our own books pass by definition is not a check
It is an advertisement holding a ruler. So the test we apply before a page goes up is whether the method in it could embarrass us — whether a reader running it on our books could come away deciding not to buy one.
Two of the five findings survive that test by being mistakes of our own, quoted from our own files. One of the four checks on the sample-page note is one our own books do not all pass, and we say so on the page rather than in a footnote. None of this is modesty. It is the only reason a reader has to believe the rest.
Where the answer belongs to somebody else, we send you to them instead of paraphrasing. The Japanese and the Arabic on this site were repaired by sitting down with tables published by other people, and those tables are linked from the page that describes the repair.
Link policy
Two links to our own site, and where they are
There are exactly two links to the site we sell from on this whole site. One is in the first paragraph above, because disclosing an interest without letting you go and look at it is not a disclosure. The other is a single line in the colophon at the foot of the front page.
The five pages that teach you something contain none. They link to libraries, reading charities and standards bodies instead. That is deliberate, and it is not modesty either: a site that exists to point at its owner is not worth anyone’s bookmark, and we would rather have the bookmark.
The subdomain this sits on carries our name, which we are not going to pretend is a coincidence. It is a free account on a host that gives you your name in the address, and this paragraph is here so that nobody has to work that out for themselves.
How it is built
Hand-written, and dependent on nobody
Every page here is HTML we typed, with one stylesheet served from this same site. No framework, no build step, no analytics, no cookies, no fonts or scripts fetched from anywhere else. The type is whatever your device already had.
There are two kinds of picture on the site and it is worth being exact about both. The diagrams are inline SVG we drew ourselves. The plates are painted interior pages lifted straight out of our own finished books, stored on this site like everything else. Every child you see here is a painting, made for a book we published. There are no photographs of children anywhere on this site, none of a customer’s child in any form, and there never will be — that is a line, not a current practice.
The reason is not nostalgia. An outside dependency is a thing that can be slow, or be down, or start watching your readers on your behalf. A static page that asks nothing of anyone else keeps working.
- Neocities The host. It gives away static space for hand-written sites, and it is the reason this one has no database behind it and nothing to log in to.
Corrections
If something here is wrong
Say so. The numbers on this site come from our own production records, and a number from a single company’s records is exactly as strong as the way it was counted — which is why the languages page spends a paragraph on the count that came out backwards before it gives you any figures at all. If you can show us a page of ours that contradicts a page of this site, the page of this site is the one that changes.