I am scanning a series of books that my father wrote from 1952 until his death in 1980.

He was a writer by trade (in the late 40s and early 50s he adapted stories as plays on radio and then on television, and and later ran an advertising agency in Toronto, where he wrote all the copy), and he loved biographies, particularly autobiographies. He is the only person I know who bought and read all the volumes of The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Anyway, when we were young children (my sister Joanna was 6 ½, my brother Jerry was 4 and I was 2  ½), my father decided to write “a snapshot of three children growing up.”

He wrote scraps of notes on a daily basis, at the dinner table, in the car, or wherever we were, and on the weekends transcribed them on his typewriter, in his own inimitable hunt-and-peck, two-finger style.

As we got a little older we would ask him to read from the “funny book” because of the amusing nature of most the events and verbal exchanges that he transcribed.

It became “The Funny Book.” Over the years, it became more of a chronicle of our lives and a diary of his, but it remained of great interest to us all.

About every two or three years, when he reached approximately 300 typewritten pages, he would end the volume and begin a new one. Altogether there are about 11 volumes. The first five are leatherbound (going through 1966) whereas the later, less interesting volumes are in three-hole punch binders.

The volumes had been sitting in a closet in my sister’s basement in Toronto for a decade, and I’ve both been worried that they might be damaged in a basement flood, etc., and been unhappy that we and our children get to read them only very sporadically. When I visited Toronto last year, I decided to take home the bound volumes and try to get them scanned.

I talked to our chief librarian at UCSF, Karen Butter, and she gave me names of a couple of people who do rare book scanning for the University.

I talked to them and realized that the cost would be prohibitive. I started looking for alternatives and finally found BookSnap.

It was the perfect solution! I have just finished all five volumes and have sent them off to my brother and sister, and everyone in our families has enjoyed them tremendously.

I had scanned some of the later volumes by taking apart the binder and putting them through a bulk two page scanner, but have considered doing the later volumes in their binders with BookSnap because the look of the “BookSnapped” volumes is so much more beautiful and true to their very personal feel (they are photographed as color images including the central meeting of the pages and with edges of other pages seen each in the background, giving them a 3D quality, rather than being scanned as individual, flat pages in black and white). I’ve also started to use BookSnap for our photo albums, rather than taking the sheets or individual photos out to scan.

The albums have to sit on the glass since they’re too big for the cradle, but it still works very well and also gives that original, album feel.