Why we started Cordis House.

The publishing industry has never quite known what to do with the working family. It knows what to do with the dying town — there is a novel about that, and it gets reviewed. It knows what to do with the man who works with his hands, as long as he stays a metaphor, standing in a doorway at dusk while someone more educated narrates his silence. What the industry has never figured out is how to publish a book for that family. Not about them. For them. To hand to the kid who waits by the window for the sound of one particular truck.

I grew up in that family. My father ran an HVAC business, and I learned the trades the way most trade-family kids learn them — by waiting for the truck, and then, when I was old enough, by riding in it. I learned that a furnace going out in January is not an inconvenience; it is a baby crying in a cold room and a phone ringing at the supper table. I learned that the hands that fix that furnace are the same hands that tuck a kid in at night, and that the kid notices both.

For twenty-five years after that, I advised families who own businesses — companies built by one generation and handed, or fumbled, to the next. I sat in a lot of kitchens and a lot of conference rooms that were really kitchens with better chairs. And I kept noticing the same thing on the shelves of those homes. There were books for everyone's children but theirs. Books about astronauts and dinosaurs and feelings, all of them fine, none of them about the actual life the kid was living: a parent who left before dawn, came home tired, smelled like the work, and was, to that child, the most important worker in the world.

So we started Cordis House to publish those books. To publish them for those families. And — this part matters to me — to publish them well.

We are not making a charity for the working family. We are making a publishing house that finally takes their shelf as seriously as everyone else's.

That word, well, is most of what this house is about. There is a temptation, when you make something for ordinary people, to make it a little cheaper, a little softer, a little more apologetic — as if dignity were a luxury good and the working family had not earned the hardcover. We reject that completely. The trade family has waited a long time for books made with the design, the binding, and the editorial care that the rest of the catalogue takes for granted. We intend to close that gap, one title at a time, and to keep the list small enough that we never publish a book we would be embarrassed to put in a child's hands twenty years from now.

We have organized the house into three imprints. Cordis Studio publishes the illustrated work — picture books and large-format editions, beginning with my own Hands Like Daddy's, a book for the children of carpenters and plumbers and roofers and the rest. Cordis Press publishes the literary and business work — essays and nonfiction on family enterprise, succession, and the long labor of building something meant to outlast you. Cordis Audio, which arrives in 2027, will record all of it, because a great many of the people we publish for would rather hear a book in the cab of a truck than hold one.

A word on the numbering, since you will see it across these letters. Cordis Global, the company this house belongs to, has been publishing letters, essays, and limited editions since 2023. The Cordis Letters you are reading carries that long-running count; this is Letter No. 047. The book imprints, by contrast, are new, and their catalogues begin honestly at 001. We are an old habit formalized into a young house — which is, come to think of it, exactly what a family business usually is.

People ask why I built a house instead of simply publishing my own book and being done with it. The honest answer is that a single book is a gesture, and a house is a promise. I did not want to make a gesture toward trade families. I wanted to build something with an editorial office and a standard and a second title already in the works — something that would still be publishing for that kid by the window long after the novelty of the first book wore off. A house can keep a promise that a book cannot.

So that is what we are doing here. We publish books for the people who hold up the world — the ones whose hands fix what is broken all day and hold what is loved all night. We publish them carefully, slowly, and for the long shelf. And we will be doing it for a while.

If that is your family, or the family you came from, then this house was built with you in mind. Come in.