The front proves a purchase. The back remembers one.

A till receipt sits high on the left chest of a white tee, turned over to its blank reverse. Faint figures show through from the front — out of focus, illegible, just print bleeding through thin paper. Across the middle, in quick ballpoint: DON'T FORGET THE BOOK. The bottom-left corner has curled.

Everything the receipt was printed to prove is on the other side, facing away.

What is actually written here?

Five words in a hand that didn't slow down to write them, on the one part of a receipt that was never designed to carry anything.

A receipt's front is manufactured for a purpose — a total, a date, a store code, proof a transaction happened. Its back is blank because nobody drew it to be read. Whoever wrote DON'T FORGET THE BOOK used it because it was the nearest flat surface with nothing already on it, not because a receipt was the obvious place to leave a reminder.

Why is the note on the back rather than over the printed total?

Because the front was already full, and writing across printed figures produces a mess nobody can read twice — not the total, not the note.

The back offered a whole clean page for the price of turning the paper over. That the ghost of the real transaction still shows through, faint and out of focus, is what happens on thin till paper: the back was not really blank, it just looked that way until something got written on it too.

Why does the handwriting look hurried rather than careful?

Because whatever needed remembering had to get written down before the moment for writing it passed.

A note made at leisure gets ruled, spaced, maybe underlined. This one runs in one motion, letters touching, nothing corrected — the kind of writing that happens standing up, at a counter, with somewhere else to be. The speed isn't a flaw in the mark. It's the reason the mark exists at all: a calmer version of the same reminder probably didn't get written, because there was time to just remember it instead.

Whose reminder is this to print?

Yours, if you wrote it — a note to yourself carries no claim beyond your own, and every word here was invented for the print.

Five words in ballpoint on a blank scrap of paper sit about as far from authored work as writing gets; nobody owns the sentence DON'T FORGET THE BOOK. A specific shop's actual printed receipt design or logo is different, and belongs to that business the way any work belongs to whoever made it — licensable, and part of the job if a real shop is genuinely the point. Style has no owner. A work does, and this receipt names neither a shop nor a person.

Does this work for something other than a book?

Yes — any reminder written on the nearest blank surface because the actual notebook wasn't at hand.

The back of an envelope, a parking ticket, a paper napkin, the flap of a takeaway box. What the design is really about is the gap between what a piece of paper was printed for and what it ended up carrying instead — a gap a flyleaf fills too, once four different owners have signed it for four different reasons, just stretched over years rather than one hurried afternoon.

Isn't a five-word reminder too small a thing to keep for good?

That's what makes it worth keeping — it wasn't meant to last past the day it was written, and printing it is the one way it does.

The receipt itself would have gone in a bin or a drawer within the week, note and all. Most reminders are like that: true for a few hours, then meaningless once the errand is done. Keeping one on purpose turns a disposable line into the single part of an ordinary day that got written down — the mark outlasting the moment it was for, the same way an underlined sentence keeps its own insistence long after the reason for underlining it is gone.

Does it print well?

Yes, if the ghost of the front stays genuinely faint and the ballpoint line stays the one dark element in the frame.

The show-through wants soft, broken, low-contrast marks that read as texture rather than words — push it any darker and it starts competing with the note, which is the opposite of what a reverse side is for. The ballpoint line wants a single confident stroke weight with no shading, since real ballpoint doesn't vary much under a hand moving quickly. Receipt white, warm ivory and a pale stone all keep the paper reading as paper. Two inks: the blue of the note, one pale grey for the ghost beneath it.

How do I get one made?

Describe the note at JustOG — what it says, how rushed the writing is, and how much of the front shows through. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

The receipt proved a purchase. Nobody needed reminding of that.