Hands Like Daddy’s

Before the sun comes up, the trucks start. One on Maple Street. One on Pine. Each one has a daddy in it. Each one has a kid still sleeping at home.

Hands Like Daddy’s is a picture book for the kids of trade-business families, the kids who wait for the sound of the truck, and the dads whose hands fix the world all day and come home to hold them at night. Six daddies. Six trades: a plumber, a carpenter, an electrician, a roofer, an HVAC tech and a mason. The same kind of hands.

Across fourteen spreads the book follows the daddies through their day, the worn step a grandmother waits on, the leak finding the kitchen beam, the furnace gone cold while a baby cries, and follows their kids at home doing the small things that look like what their daddies do. The same refrain runs through each page. Hands like Daddy’s. At the end of the day every truck heads home, every door opens, and the same hands that fix the world all day come home to hold you.

For ages four to eight. For Father’s Day. For every kid who has ever watched a daddy come home tired.

The Founding Readers, an opt-in tier capped at one hundred, are named inside the first edition.

The book follows six trades: the plumber, the carpenter, the electrician, the roofer, the HVAC tech, and the mason. They are in the book because they are the ones who build and maintain the house, and because a kid can watch all six of them work without leaving the block.

The roofer is my brother-in-law. The rest came out of 15 years of sitting across from owners of businesses like the one I grew up in.

Every copy is printed to order, one at a time. Nothing sits in a warehouse. That is slower than the big retailers and we tell people so.

The first edition was pre-funded by over 50 Founding Readers who chose the tier before the book existed. Hundreds of copies went out in the first window, most of them to people who heard about it from someone they actually know. The Founding Reader tier is capped at 100 and is still open.

Why there’s a house →

We launched Cordis Studio with this book on purpose. A house tells you what it is by its first title, and we wanted ours to say plainly: the working family gets the hardcover, the careful binding, the full attention of the house. Ron Smith wrote Hands Like Daddy’s out of his own childhood in a family HVAC business, and we made it the way you make a book you expect a family to read until the pages wear out.

It is a small book about a large thing, the hands that fix what is broken all day and hold what is loved all night. We could not have asked for a truer first page for the imprint.