Once the letters are out of Gmail you have a file, and a file is not a book. There are four ways families usually bridge that gap, and they differ enormously in effort, cost and how much of the original survives. Here is an honest account of each, including where ours fits and where it does not.
Copy and paste into a word processor
The obvious one. Open the mail, copy each letter, paste it into Word or Google Docs, insert the photographs, export a PDF, send it to a print shop.
- Cost: nothing but printing.
- Effort: very high. A hundred letters is a hundred rounds of copy, paste, format, and find the right photographs.
- What survives: everything, if you are careful. You are the one deciding, so nothing is lost without your knowing.
This is genuinely the right answer for some families, particularly if the mission was short or the correspondence light. The reason most people abandon it around letter thirty is not the typing — it is the formatting drift, and matching photographs back to the week they belong to.
A photo-book service
Shutterfly, Blurb, Mixbook and the rest make beautiful photo books and are built for pictures with captions rather than for pages of text.
- Cost: moderate, and often discounted.
- Effort: high. You are still placing every letter by hand.
- What survives: the photographs, beautifully. Long letters tend to get trimmed to fit the layout, which is the quiet problem — the book ends up a record of the pictures rather than the writing.
A local print shop
Hand over a finished PDF and get a bound copy. Good shops will advise on paper and binding, and you can see and feel the result before committing.
- Cost: varies widely; usually the most expensive per copy.
- Effort: all of the copy-and-paste work above, plus a conversation about specifications.
- What survives: whatever you put in the PDF.
Worth knowing: a print shop prints what you give it. The hard part was never the printing.
What MissionMems does
You send the mail export. It reads every message, works out which ones are the weekly letters home, puts them in order, and sets them with the photographs that arrived attached to them — matched to the week they came with, because that is how they were sent. The result is a hardcover book.
- Effort: the export, then a pass through what it found to confirm names, chapters and a few facts.
- What survives: the letters as written. Nothing is rewritten or summarized, and you can see everything it found before anything prints.
- Cost: $200 covers up to 250 pages, then 50 cents a page after that. Most missions come to between $200 and $225. Nothing prints until you approve it.
Where it is not the right answer: if you want a designed scrapbook with captions you have written yourself, a photo-book service will serve you better. This makes a book of the correspondence, which is a different object.
Is this the same thing as a missionary scrapbook?
Not quite, and it is worth being precise about the difference rather than calling both the same name. A scrapbook is something you design: you choose the layout, write your own captions, and decide what goes on each page. That is real work, and for some families it is the point — a scrapbook is a project as much as it is a keepsake.
MissionMems makes a different kind of object. There is no layout to choose and nothing to caption, because the book is built from what was actually sent: every weekly letter, in the order it was written, with the photographs that arrived attached to that letter. Nothing is rewritten, trimmed, or replaced with a caption in somebody else’s words. If what you want is a scrapbook you build by hand, a photo-book service above is the right tool for that. If what you want is the correspondence itself — bound, complete, and exactly as it was written — that is what this is.
What each one actually costs in time
Money is the number everybody compares and time is the one that decides it, because the hand-made routes are not expensive — they are long, and they are long in evenings you have to find.
A two-year mission is roughly a hundred weekly letters. Working at a genuinely brisk ten minutes each — find it, copy it, paste it, fix the formatting, find the photographs that came with it, place them — that is about seventeen hours before anybody has thought about a cover. Most families do not find seventeen hours. They find four, get to letter thirty, and the file sits there.
- Copy and paste: fifteen to twenty hours, spread over however many months it takes to lose patience.
- Photo-book service: similar, plus learning an editor, minus some of the formatting pain.
- Print shop: all of the above, and then a conversation about paper and binding.
- An automated service: about an hour, nearly all of it checking rather than making.
The question to ask about rewriting
Several services in this category run the letters through a spelling and grammar pass, and some advertise it. It sounds like a kindness and it is worth thinking about for a moment before you accept it.
What gets corrected is a nineteen-year-old writing quickly in a foreign country on a borrowed keyboard: the run-on sentences, the misspelled place names, the sentence that starts again halfway through. Those are the parts that sound like them. A tidy book reads better and is, in a quite literal sense, less of a record.
There is no right answer, and plenty of families genuinely want the tidier version. The thing to avoid is finding out afterwards which one you bought. Ask before you pay, whichever service you use.
How to decide
- If the pictures are the point, use a photo-book service.
- If the writing is the point, and there is a lot of it, hand-assembly is the thing that usually defeats people.
- If you are not sure, export the mail first either way. That step is free, takes ten minutes, and every one of these options needs it — here is how.