Marcus, Denise, and the two first readers. Our porch. Our book.

What we are, in plain words

Most "Black-owned" book brands online are a logo and a warehouse. You can't find a face, or a person who answers.

So here's ours.

No warehouse. No investors. No "team." Two parents, two kids, a car, and a book we checked line by line.

"I searched for you and found nothing."

A woman emailed us that last month. She searched Front Porch Press, found almost nothing, and wanted to know if we were real before she ordered.

She was right to check. And she was right that there's almost nothing there.

Here's why.

We started selling this book out of the trunk of our car. At Black History parades. At Black Pride parades. At co-ops, at church, at folding tables anywhere our people were already gathered. People flipped through it, handed us cash or wrote their address on a notepad, and we mailed it ourselves that week.

The reviews on this site are those people. They looked us in the eye before they ever typed our name.

Where it started. The trunk is still our main store.

We've never been in a catalog. We don't do press. We're not on the big sites. That's on purpose.

Look at what happened this year to the places that hold our history. At Harpers Ferry, a wall of remembrance naming hundreds of enslaved people took years to build. It was locked in an empty building before it ever opened. On the Selma to Montgomery trail, about 80 pieces marking the 1965 march were taken down. Two children's booklets from Black history sites quietly stopped being printed. A judge had to order some of it put back. The pattern is simple: you get noticed, you get a letter.

The more well known you are, the more of a target you are. So we stay small on purpose. Word of mouth, a trunk, a table, and this one website. That's how it was never in a box somebody could cut. And that's why it's still here.

If you're reading this, somebody probably told you about us. That's the only way anyone finds us.

Don't take our word for it. Check.

Everything below is something you can test yourself before you spend a dollar.

A real page from the book. Every inventor's patent number is printed right there.

Why two parents in Texas made a history book

We had the shelf a lot of Black parents have. Four books on it. All bought with the same hope. Not one name in them our kids hadn't already heard. The same twenty people, better illustrated, a paragraph each.

Then we found a mistake. One of those books said Lewis Latimer invented the light bulb. He didn't. He patented a better way to make the part inside it that glows, so bulbs stopped breaking and got cheap enough for regular houses. That's a bigger story than the myth, and the book got it wrong. We had already read that page to our daughter as if it were true.

Nobody was checking the facts. Everybody was selling the feeling. The company that printed that book walked away fine. Our daughter was the one standing in the classroom.

So we built the book we couldn't buy. Latimer's real page is the one you saw above.

The shelf that started it. Good books. Same five names.

The people behind it

What's actually in the book

You've bought the "twenty people, a paragraph each" book before. So here are the numbers, not the feelings.

Three things we refused to print

These are in most Black history books for kids. They aren't in the record, so they aren't in ours.

• That Alexander Miles invented the elevator. Elevators were already running. What he patented in 1887 was the doors that open and close by themselves, so nobody had to remember to shut them. That's the part worth knowing, and it's what his page says.
• That the saying "the real McCoy" comes from Elijah McCoy's oil cup. Nobody can prove it. His page has his patent number and what the oil cup did, and nothing he didn't earn.
• That Benjamin Banneker drew the plan for Washington, D.C. from memory after the architect quit. He helped survey the city's borders. That is the record, and that is what we would print.

One wrong fact costs your child more than one fact. The first time a teacher corrects her in front of the class, she stops trusting what her family told her. We understood that before we printed a single page.

Thousands of sources checked. Hundreds of names cut. This is what "verified" looks like at our house.

What this book won't do

We'd rather tell you now than have you find out after.

• It's a history book. Put it next to Captain Underpants and she's grabbing Captain Underpants first. That's why it's built one page at a time, so one page a night is a win.
• The pictures are the real patent drawings, in blueprint style. Not cartoons. If you want smiling characters, this isn't that book.
• Some people in it have no photograph, because none survived. Their page has a colored bar where the face would be. We didn't make one up.
• It won't fix the curriculum, change the school, or stop what's happening in this country. It puts something in her hands that holds up when someone pushes. A name. A date. A number.

Where your order actually goes

When you order, one of us prints the label and packs the box at our own table. No fulfillment center. If something's wrong, you email the same people who packed it. And part of every sale goes to Black organizations doing the work on the ground.

Shipping day. All hands.