Minted, first shelf
You snap it, Book Keeper polishes the portrait, and the book gets its name. From this day it is not "a copy of Invisible Cities" — it is this one.
Owners change. Shelves change. Cities change. The book remains itself. Book Keeper gives each book in your collection its own identity — a portrait, a permanent identifier, a QR code — so that wherever it travels, and whoever keeps it next, its story arrives with it.
This is the whole system, in the order it happens. A book enters as a photograph and leaves as a citizen of your shelf.
Photograph the book as it is — on the shelf, in your hand, under whatever lamp is nearest. No studio required.
Book Keeper straightens, brightens, and crops the photograph into a proper portrait, and keeps it as the book's official image.
The book receives a unique identifier and its QR code — identity papers issued once, never reissued, never reused.
Lend it, gift it, sell it, lose it to a good friend. The identity rides along with the book, keeper after keeper.
Imagine one copy, thirty years from now. Every keeper it passes through adds a line to its ledger — and none of them can take the ledger with them when they go.
You snap it, Book Keeper polishes the portrait, and the book gets its name. From this day it is not "a copy of Invisible Cities" — it is this one.
A birthday gift. She scans the code on the flyleaf and the book introduces itself: where it has lived, who kept it before her, the portrait it was given the day it was named.
A stranger pulls it off a dusty shelf, curious about the small code inside the cover. One scan, and fifteen years of history surface — the book never forgot a single keeper.
A taste of the ceremony. Name any book on your shelf and the desk will strike it an identifier and a spine mark — the same title always earns the same name, which is rather the point.
The slip is blank. Name a book, and the desk will do the rest.
Book Keeper is, today, exactly one static page — no framework, no database, no backend. Deliberately so. The idea gets a home and a face first; the machinery arrives once the idea has settled.
Built for a collector with a wide imagination, who suspects — correctly — that books have inner lives.