What to Give a Club for Its Jubileum

Your club is turning fifty. There’s a committee, there’s a budget line, and there’s a meeting where somebody has to say what the money is actually for.

The suggestions will be a plaque, a framed photograph, an engraved trophy, or a bench. All perfectly nice. All destined for a corridor wall that members will walk past for the next twenty years without once slowing down.

A jubileum deserves better than furniture.

Here’s a different answer: commission a book.

What a jubileumboek can actually be

The traditional version is a written history, worthy, expensive to produce, read once by the people who wrote it.

We make something people use.

A commemorative colouring or activity book built around your club: your grounds drawn

properly, your kit and colours, the moments members already tell stories about, the building as it looked in 1975 and as it looks now. Puzzles and pages that reference things only members would recognise. The founding committee and the current one, named. Space at the back for signatures.

It sits on a coffee table, gets picked up, gets shown to visitors. A member’s partner who has never set foot in the clubhouse will look through it. That is not what happens to a plaque.

Or a novella, a proper narrative history, if your club has a story worth telling at that length. A hundred years of a harmonie, a schuttersgilde, a rowing club, a carnival association. That’s the longer, more serious option and we do it too.

It’s a real published book

This is the part that separates a commission from a print job.

Every title we produce carries a US-registered ISBN through our Bowker registration and a listing in the international trade directory. That means it exists as a published work, catalogued, orderable, referenceable, with a barcode that scans.

Practically, for a club, that matters more than it sounds:

• It can be deposited with a local or regional archive, which will generally accept a registered publication and not a self-printed booklet

• It can go into the bibliotheek catalogue

• It can be cited in a local history

• It exists after everyone on the current committee has stepped down

A jubileum is about the club outlasting the people running it. A registered publication is one of the few commemorative objects that behaves that way.

Which language, and why it matters

We publish in English by default. For a Dutch or German club that may sound like the wrong answer, so here is the reasoning and the choice.

A largely wordless commemorative book is unaffected. A colouring or activity book with artwork, captions and names falls outside Dutch fixed book price law on a text-volume test, whatever language it’s in. So a Dutch-language commemorative colouring book for your club is perfectly straightforward, and it’s what most clubs want anyway.

A written history is where language bites. A Dutch-language novella with real prose falls under the wet op de vaste boekenprijs. It has to be registered with the Commissariaat voor de Media at a fixed price, and after that nobody, not us, not the club, not a shop, may sell it above or below that figure for six months. If you were planning to sell copies at the anniversary dinner at one price and in the clubhouse at another, that isn’t available.

An English edition has no such restriction, and the club sets and changes the price freely.

Three practical options, then:

• Dutch, wordless, colouring or activity format. No restriction, no registration.

• English prose, full pricing freedom, and reaches members abroad and any English-speaking connections the club has.

• Dutch prose, we’ll do it, with the fixed price registered properly. Fine if you’re distributing to members rather than running a pricing strategy.

We also translate: €100 per 20,000 words or part thereof, €65 for each further 20,000. A club history of 30,000 words comes to €165 for an English edition alongside the Dutch one. Some clubs do both, Dutch for members, English for the archive and for anyone tracing family back to the town.

Tell us which you’re after and we’ll be straight with you about the consequences either way.

What it costs

Format	Price
Commemorative colouring or activity book, or journal	€600
Novella, to 50,000 words	€1,200
Each additional 18,000 words	+€150

That’s the whole production: concept work against your brief, original artwork, layout, print specification, cover design, the ISBN, and trade registration.

Copies are then bought at unit cost plus 20%, around €10.58 on a title with a €18.45 cover price.

Who pays for it, three routes that work

The club commissions it directly

Straightforward. It comes out of the jubileum budget, the club owns the run, and copies go to members, guests and the archive.

A sponsor underwrites it

This is the one worth raising at the committee meeting.

A local business, the café, the garden centre, the brewery, the firm that has had a board on your fence for fifteen years, pays for the production and has their name on the cover of the thing your club keeps for the next twenty-five years.

For them it’s better value than a season of shirt advertising and it costs less. For you, the budget line goes back into the anniversary itself.

If that sponsor also stocks our titles, they qualify for 35% or 50% off the production cost. Worth mentioning to them, because it makes the ask considerably easier.

The club funds it by selling it

Buy the run at unit cost plus 20%, sell at the cover price or above, keep the difference.

On a €18.45 title that’s €7.87 a copy to the club. A hundred copies sold across the anniversary year raises €787 and clears the €600 production cost with room over. Members buy them, families buy them, guests at the dinner buy them, and you have something to sell at every event for the rest of the year.

A plaque does not do that.

The thing to get right: start early

This is the practical warning, and it’s the reason to have the conversation now rather than in eight months.

Production itself is quick. A colouring or activity book is two to four weeks from signed-off brief to finished book. A novella depends on the subject more than the length, and we’ll agree a real date rather than a flattering one.

Everything before production is not quick. Gathering photographs from members, agreeing what goes in, tracking down who was on the 1974 committee, getting the committee to approve a concept, that’s the part that takes months, and it’s entirely in your hands.

Then printing and delivery on top.

Commission at least four to six months before the date. Clubs that come to us eight weeks out get a book. Clubs that come to us six months out get the book they wanted.

What we need from you

• Your logo, colours and any brand material you have

• Photographs, the more the better, and old ones matter most

• A rough history: founding, moves, notable years, anything members reference

• Names you want included, and any you want checked with people first

• What the club is actually like, in your own words. This is the most useful thing you can send and the thing people most often skip

You sign off the brief before anything is produced, so you know exactly what’s being made before the club commits money to it.

One thing to be clear about

We publish for adults. Our house style carries adult humour and our catalogue is not aimed at under-18s.

Your commissioned book is built to your brief, so it will be what you specify, but we don’t produce children’s titles, and we won’t take a brief aimed at a youth section. The senior side, the veterans, the supporters’ club, the committee and the club’s own history are all fine. A junior team book isn’t something we can do.

Who this suits

Any organised group of adults with a shared identity and an anniversary. In practice that has meant:

Sport, football, hockey, tennis, rowing, cycling, korfbal, darts, bowls, shooting guilds.

Music and performance, harmonie and fanfare bands, choirs, amateur dramatics, carnival associations.

Growing and making, volkstuinverenigingen, craft guilds, model societies, brewing clubs.

Trade and professional, associations, guilds, alumni networks, long-standing family firms marking their own anniversary rather than a club’s.

If your group has a committee, a treasurer and a membership roll, this works. The tighter the group, the better it works.

Anniversary coming up? Tell us about the club, the year you’re marking, and roughly when the date falls. We’ll come back with a concept, a format and a realistic timeline.

[Talk to us about a jubileum book]

Also worth reading: branded books for businesses, useful if you’re the sponsor rather than the club.