Lyu's wife Liang Bing sells brushes to a customer[Photo by Yang Yang / China Daily]

Encounter

Li, teaching book design at the university, took a ruler, a notebook and a pen to study the books. She was surprised that the books she saw there, as attractive as they were, were not that fancy, and they did not strike her as being particularly collectable. That encounter, she says, gave her a new insight into book design.

Lyu was just as inspired by the exhibition, and told his friends: "I'm going to make a most beautiful book." They both promised to help.

However, in 2010 the family had many other weighty problems to face. In the spring, Lyu's father, 63, had a stroke and a bad fall. When his mother Ma tried to help, she broke a leg and lay in hospital for two months.

Later in summer, after Ma left home to visit her mother, she needed to return home to look after her oldest son, who was ill. Ma's mother died, and in December Lyu's mother-in-law died of cancer.

All of this shook Lyu badly. In 2011 he started collecting materials for the book, trying to tell the stories of his family and the bookstore from many different angles.

"I wanted to include not only the stories of the bookstore, my family, and the orders, but also my father's oil paintings, my wife's oil paintings, the signets that I carved, my children's writings and drawings, and other precious memories," Lyu says.

Li says: "But it was too much. String-bound books are usually half the thickness of what ours is.

"This was going to be the first time and perhaps the last when he would make a book. But there were so many different themes that did not suit a book. So we had to choose the major ones and include as much as possible, and that was a real big challenge and opportunity for me."

The shop had had 10,000 orders, many of them similar, and including all would have made the book tedious, so they picked more than 2,000 and put the most representative ones in the main part of the book and the others were made into four flip books on the left side.