Last Christmas, Heloise was excited to get one of the last copies of the 2026 Redstone Diary.

This latest edition was sold out almost everywhere by the first week of January!

If you haven’t seen one before, it’s a simple, spiral-bound diary with a bunch of images, quotes and creative prompts inside it.

There have been 39 editions over almost four decades.

Each one focuses on a different, curated theme – for example, family, beauty, Europe, home, or moments of happiness in everyday life.

This year’s was called Imagining, and it’s all about enchantment. It includes William Blake’s angels, spectral photography, a poem from Emily Dickinson, philosophical warnings and John Lennon’s lyrics’.

But regardless of the theme, many devotees snap one up every year.

In fact, there are pre-orders for the 2027 online already!

Just imagine if you had a product like that?!

What a fun and rewarding way to make money…

All from something that would make you proud and would help people live a richer, more fulfilled life.

But here’s the thing…

You COULD potentially make a product like this.

An Interesting Angle on a Classic Public Domain Business Idea

As I was browsing through Heloise’s Redstone Diary, I realised something.

Many of the images and texts were clearly taken from ‘PUBLIC DOMAIN’.

If you don’t already know, ‘Public domain’ works include books, magazines, illustrations and artworks whose copyrights have expired (or which have never been copyright protected in the first place.)

They have no owner and are freely available to reproduce, sell and distribute.

You can take images wholesale…. or you can cut them up, rework them or turn them into collages.

Same goes for texts…

You can take chapters, poems, sections of text, or quotes and then compile them in a new arrangement.

Which means you could create something similar to the Redstone Diary, using public domain sources.

There’s no need for you to write anything, draw anything, design anything yourself.

Instead, pick from thousands of old texts that are freely available online…

And make your own themed book, filled with nuggets of inspiration, wisdom and knowledge – courtesy of beloved artists, philosophers, poets and authors.

These could include famous names as well as obscure writers lost to history.

For example, here are some fictional works in the public domain:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.

There’s also poetry by Emily Dickinson, William Blake, John Keats and Walt Whitman.

Or here are some non-fiction classics….

• The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel (source of Rhonda Byrne’s self-help book the “The Secret”)
• The Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana
• The Art of War – by Sun Tzu.
• Dream Psychology – by Sigmund Freud
• Tao Te Ching – by Laozi
• The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie
• The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. – (an influential guides to writing.

You can also find stoic philosophy by the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, essays by Ralph Waldo and the diaries of Samual Pepys, Jane Austen, and Franz Kafka.

With the ‘Redstone’ approach, you don’t simply reproduce and repackage texts.

Instead, you ‘CURATE’ a selection of quotes or extracts on a theme.

For example, ‘Dreams & Night’, “Great Journeys’, ‘The Natural World‘, ‘Magic & Wonder’, ‘Visions of the Future’, ‘Love & Longing’ or ‘Grief’.

You then add illustrations, photos, cartoons, sketches, maps and other visual elements from the public domain.

These might include ancient maps, anatomical diagrams, Punch cartoons, Edwardian photographs, Japanese woodcuts and 1950s comic book strips.

The product wouldn’t necessarily need to be in the form of a diary (which are obviously very seasonal)…

Instead, you could create a themed notebook, planner or motivational guide to be sold all year around…

It could be a:-

• Print-on-demand (POD) book that you get manufactured and fulfilled by another company, with no need to invest in stock up front, store it at home, or post it to customers.
• A digital product you sell on a marketplace like Etsy, where the sales and downloads are automated.

(Or, potentially, both!)

Okay, so let’s look at how you might do this…

Step One – The Purpose of the Product

First, work out what the purpose of your product is going to be, who is going to buy it, and why.

To do that, you need to target a specific niche audience with a goal or problem.

I recommend you look at two issues of What Really Makes Money.

• Niche Drilling – this helps you research and target niches where there is not too much competition, but enough demand for information.
• Ethical Stalking – this helps you research your customer and work out their goals, problems, fears and desires.

When you have a target reader in mind, consider what they might need…

• Help with planning and goal-setting…
• A practical way to track habits or monitor progress…
• Daily inspiration and motivation
• Deeper knowledge and wisdom about a subject they’re passionate about
• Comfort and reassurance about a problem or challenge they are going through
• A diary for expressing their thoughts and feelings.

Your product could do one or more of the above!

Step Two – The Theme

Next, give your publication a theme or concept, around which you can then select appropriate texts and images.

Examples include…

• Pets (cats, dogs, horses, birds)
• Nature (mushrooms, flowers, trees, landscapes)
• Travel & places (cities, countries, regions, maps)
• Architecture & homes (buildings, gardens, landscaping)
• Vintage advertising & typography
• Business & Finance (entrepreneurialism, trading, investing, savings and debts)
• Space & time (astronomy, science fiction, space travel, the moon)
• Fashion (vintage styles, historical fashion, hair and makeup, costume design)
• Food & Drink (beer, wine, fine dining, recipes, farming, foraging)
• Art, Design & Crafts (painting, illustration, comic books, cartoons, craftwork, knitting and crochet)
• Spirituality (religion, meditation, magic, tarot, astrology)
• Philosophy (ethics, metaphysics, political ideas, models of reality, philanthropy)

If you want help to find more, open up an AI chatbot like Chat GPT and say:

“I want to create a themed [planner, guide, diary, compilation] that includes extracts from public domain texts and images for [broad audience category]. Please suggest [X] concepts and themes.”

For example: “I want to create a themed diary that includes extracts from public domain texts and images for the over 60s market. Please suggest 20 concepts and themes.”

You will get suggestions like these, which even include public domain works to look for.

——

1. A Year of Quiet Wisdom. Short extracts from philosophers, poets, and essayists on ageing, patience, and perspective Sources: Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Emerson, Montaigne

2. The Natural Year. Seasonal diary structured around nature’s cycles Texts: John Ruskin, Gilbert White, Thoreau Images: Botanical illustrations, landscapes, birds

3. Letters From Another Age. Each week opens with an extract from historic letters Sources: Jane Austen’s letters, Victorian correspondence, Civil War letters

4. A Year of Simple Living. Reflections on frugality, contentment, and self-reliance Texts: William Morris, Thoreau, Samuel Smiles Angle: “We’ve been here before—and survived”

5. The Garden Diary. Weekly gardening reflections and quotes. Texts: Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, medieval herbals. Images: Vintage seed catalogues, botanical plates

—–

Now you can start harvesting material from the public domain.

Step Three – Gathering Content

If you have a specific author, artist or work in mind, then go to google.com, type it in and add “public domain”.

For example, “Jane Austen Public Domain” or “Meditations by Marcus Aurelius public domain”.

You’ll get shown links to the public domain sites on which they appear.

Or use an AI tool like Chat GPT or Perplexity.ai.

“Find me links to public domain sources for the following author/artist/work.”

You can also go to these public domain sites…

• Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) public domain works that can be downloaded in different formats, including plain text and EPUB formats.
• The Internet Archive, https://archive.org/ A digital library with a vast collection of books.
• Open library https://openlibrary.org/
• Europeana https://www.europeana.eu/en

You can find artists, authors and themes via the search boxes (just enter keywords). Or search for topics. For example if I type ‘war’ into Project Gutenberg’s search box it will give me this:

For images, try these websites:

• Flickr – one of the largest photographic image sites on the Internet.
• The UK National Archives over 20,000 photos from UK and Commonwealth countries.
• The British Library 1,000,000 images taken mostly from illustrations in 17th, 18th and 19th Century books. The Smithsonian has 2.8 million high-resolution images from across its collections here.
• Rawpixel is one of the largest contributors of free photographs and images
• Old Book Illustrations has illustrations from a large collection of books. Also try From Old Books
• Free Vintage Illustrations vintage illustrations, mainly whimsical and sentimental
• Reusable Art a collection of vintage drawings
• The Graphics Fairy – scanned from the blog owner’s collection of antique books, prints, postcards and trade cards.
• The John Leech Archive – cartoons from Punch magazine
• The Pulp Magazines Project – an archive of the pulpwood magazine from 1896–1946.
• Comic Book Plus ‘golden- and silver-age’ comic books, comic strips and pulp fiction.
• Public Work is packed with 100,000 ‘copyright-free’ images.

Step Four Creating the Book

Canva is ideal for this kind of project because you don’t need design skills and it has templates you can use.

Go to Canva.com and create a free account, then search for

• “Book interior”
• “Journal”
• “Planner”
• “Notebook”

Choose a template and set your page size based on your end product:

• 6” x 9” (classic book size)
• A5 (popular for notebooks and diaries)
• Square formats work well for Etsy downloads

A typical interior page might look like this:

• A short quote or extract from a public domain text
• An accompanying image or illustration
• Plenty of white space or lined space.
• Motivational prompt, eg: “What does this make you think of?” or “Write freely about your thoughts on this topic for 5 minutes…”

You should repeat the same sort of layout again and again throughout the text.

If you want to cut, edit and arrange public domain images you could use Nano Banana.

This is like an AI version of Photoshop, except you just ask the AI to carry out the tasks in everyday language.

It’s ideal to use if the image is wonky, too dark or colours are dull.

You can also use it to enhance detail, remove elements from the image, or merge multiple images.

Once edited in Nano Banana, you can upload the image into Canva and drop it into your layout.

Step Five – Manufacture

You can use Print-on-Demand services like Printful and Printify which will manufacturer and ship your product

These can be integrated with an Etsy accounts, so that any orders that come via that marketplace go directly to the manufacturer, who will send it to the customer.

Or you could upload your creation to Amazon KDP.

They allow you to choose from

• Printed on demand paperbacks
• Perfect bound (normal book spine)
• Black & white or colour interior

For spiral bound books you could try sites like Gelato, Book Printing UK or Prodigi.

Or google “spiral bound books print on demand UK’ to shop around for good prices and reliable turnarounds.

Anyway, I hope this idea excites you…

I reckon it’s a really fun and helpful way to repurpose public domain materials for a new audience.

But let me know what you think!