Bound for Posterity : Publishing: Firm will write anyone’s biography. But you <i> really </i> have to want your story told; it can cost as much as $45,000.

NEWPORT BEACH —  Bookstore shelves are lined with a slew of new biographies and autobiographies chronicling the lives of Lyndon Johnson, Ali MacGraw, Donald Trump, Muhammad Ali, and both Sonny and Cher.

The odds are slim, however, that anyone will ever plunk down $19.95 for the life story of the person who stares back at you in the bathroom mirror each morning.

But that doesn’t mean that your own life isn’t worth preserving between covers, or that the personal and professional experiences of a lifetime wouldn’t fill a book that could be passed down, like an heirloom quilt, to your heirs.

Now they can. For a price.

Enter Legacy Publishing, a company built on the proposition that no one’s life is too mundane to not warrant a biography.

The 18-month-old company, which relocated from Hawaii to Newport Beach last fall, publishes custom-bound personal biographies.

The cost for literary immortality does not come cheap: A full, 250- to 300-page biography, with 20 hand-bound copies, can run as high as $45,000.

“What we do is strictly for people as gifts for their families for their own personal libraries,” said Penny Pence Smith, president and executive editor of Legacy Publishing. She said most successful people consider writing autobiographies, but they either don’t have the time or find the task too daunting.

Legacy Publishing does all the work over a nine- to 12-month period.

Smith first conducts between five and 10 four-hour interview sessions with the biographical subject, probing for the triumphs and tragedies, the lessons learned over a lifetime and the philosophies that may have sustained them. After a first draft is written, Smith and the subject edit and revise the text on up to the final polish.

Each copy of the heirloom biography is printed on archival-quality paper and hand-bound by a third-generation bookbinder in Hilo, Hawaii, who creates custom covers in wood, fabric or other materials.

The result is what Legacy bills as a “work of art.”

Given the $45,000 price tag for a full biography and even the $10,000-plus for a shorter, slice-of-life book that chronicles a onetime event such as an around-the-world trip, Smith acknowledges that a Legacy heirloom biography is not for everyone.

“The way we look at it,” she said, “is if somebody is going to leave something for their children, or if there’s an important birthday or milestone in the family coming up, they could buy a new luxury car or boat, but it’s going to depreciate and be obsolete in a very short time.”

An heirloom biography, she said, “is something that goes on and on. It sounds really strange, but if immortality is a concern this is one way of assuring it.”

Of course, if someone wants to write his or her own story, they could have it published elsewhere for far less. Twenty copies of a standard quality, 300-page hardcover book could be printed for $800 at Thomson-Shore, a short-run book manufacturer in Dexter, Mich.

Smith, a former newspaper correspondent and advertising consultant, came up with the concept several years ago in Hawaii, where she and her husband, Dixon, published coffee-table books about the islands, among other books.

One of her most-prized possessions is a set of biographical volumes her grandfather--a onetime mayor of Boise, Ida., and the president of a private college in the Rockies--wrote for her father.

“My dad didn’t talk a lot about his family, and my only knowledge of my grandfather was through these memoirs,” said Smith, 48. “A lot of my friends would come to the house and see these things and say, ‘Boy, nobody ever did that for me. I don’t even have an idea of what my family thought about or what was important to them.”’

Dixon Smith, who serves as Legacy’s marketing director, laments the loss in recent generations of the thread of continuity in which the elders passed down to their offspring their stories and lessons learned in life.

“I’m feeling more and more strongly that it’s a responsibility of our parents and grandparents to pass those lessons down because where else are you going to learn them?” said Dixon, 47, whose own father never talked to him about his past.

“I knew where he was born--the facts--but I didn’t know the heart of the man,” he said. “I don’t think we ever spent 20 minutes of what one would call quality time communicating. I feel a sense of loss. He’s gone now, and there’s no way to capture that.”

That’s what motivated Bob Morrison to have Legacy Publishing write his autobiography.

The 53-year-old thrice-married Phoenix resident had tried writing his story several years ago. And although he is a business writer and has self-published 63 books in the past three decades, including “Why SOBs Succeed and Nice Guys Fail in Business,” he found the task of writing his life story too overwhelming.

“I just could never pull it together so it didn’t sound like a textbook like all the rest of the stuff I do,” said Morrison, who wanted to ensure that his 3-year-old son would know who his father was and what he stood for.

By the time his son is an adult, Morrison will be close to 70, and by then, he said, it may be too late.

“Since I became a diabetic, you figure you’re closer to the end than the beginning,” Morrison said. “I’d hate to think I missed it, and my other children (from a previous marriage) don’t know all that much about me.”

His Legacy biography is entitled “Runs for Six Seconds,” referring to the first of his more than 100 business ventures: a toy boat that runs for six seconds, which he sold by mail order in Boy’s Life when he was 13.

The book cost him nearly $40,000.

Although most of their biographical subjects have been forthcoming during the interview process, Penny Pence Smith said it sometimes takes awhile to get them to open up.

One woman, she said, “wanted to do this so badly, but she was terrified. I think maybe she felt what she had to say was inconsequential. It took about two sessions before she became herself and started talking about what her life was like.”

What Smith has discovered “is most people don’t think their life is important, or that what they have to say is going to be perceived as important. Or they may think that everybody will think they’ve got this huge ego and they’re embarrassed.

“They have to work beyond that if they’re doing it for their kids.”

In conducting her interviews, Smith said, she tries to help people not only recall past events but remember what the significant aspects were. “One of the most important things I ask people to do is decide what it is they want to say with this book. Usually, there’s one compelling reason.”

One middle-aged woman, for example, had her biography written for her 18- and 21-year-old daughters because she wanted them to see what her childhood was like so they would understand why she raised them the way she did.

The Smiths, who live in Newport Beach, seem to have set up shop in the right locale. Smith said the local response has been “very positive. If there’s anything we’re dealing with in terms of challenges right now, it is the economy.”

The company has completed three biographies and have three more in progress.

But even if a $45,000 custom biography isn’t for everyone, Smith believes “the concept very definitely is for everyone.”

Particularly for members of the now-aging baby boom generation.

“We’re all living with parents in their final days,” she said. “The best thing I can tell my friends is to take a tape recorder over there and make them talk. It’s the only way you’re going to get it.”