Gift Ideas for a Book Lover

Why, oh why, would I choose my first entry in the 12 Days of Book Barmy Gift Ideas for the Booklover in your life?

Because you need time and stealth.  First, you need to invite yourselves over to their home and while they make the tea (or margaritas, however you and your friends roll) covertly scan their bookcases for the titles below.

You see, the Booklover in you life has likely read most everything — they sneer at the quickly-found bestsellers, probably own most of the well-known classics, and in short, are the most difficult person on your gift list.  So with great thought, I am recommending two books that are somewhat lesser known…in the hope that you can surprise them.

These books may require some work, a trip to your local used bookstore or independent bookstore may result in actual copies on the shelf or an order will put them in your hands shortly.  The chains or big box stores will not stock these — don’t even try.  Even the big A has a really paltry selection of editions.

HERE is a link to find your local independent bookstore.  And in an shameless plug for local independents, get a gift receipt.  Then, if your book lover already owns these books, they will happily get something else they want.

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“When you sell a man a book,” says Roger Mifflin, protagonist of these classic book-selling novels, “you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life.”

 

 

Parnassus on Wheels & The Haunted Bookshop

by Christopher Morley

 

Published in 1917, Parnassus on Wheels tells the tale of Roger Mifflin, a traveling bookseller, who roams farmlands and backwoods with a horse-drawn bookshop, spreading the gospel of books. His faith in the power of the word is boundless. People need books, he insists, even if they don’t know they need them.   Along the way he meets Helen McGill, a good-hearted spinster, and they share adventures while slowly falling in love.

The plot sounds simple, and it is. But the story is written with easy grace and the characters are just plain adorable. But what makes the story so appealing, is that Morley wrote it for bibliophiles and his intense love of books and reading permeates every chapter. Reading Roger Mifflin wax lyrical about specific books makes us hunger to read those books ourselves. When I first read Parnassus in my late teens, I jotted down a reading list culled from the book (which I still keep in my copy). Some of the authors he mentions have sustained me ever since.

Your Booklover will intimately relate to this book-reverent tale, because it is as antiquated and quaint as the horse-drawn wagon from which Roger sells his treasures.  Today’s focus on instant messaging and publisher’s concern for profits over quality has perhaps made book-loving a relic of the past. But don’t worry, your Book lover, if they are anything like me, is happy to be a dinosaur.

 

The Haunted Bookshop is a sequel to Parnassus on Wheels. Roger Mifflin and Helen McGill, now wedded, have opened a bookstore in Brooklyn called Parnassus at Home (not The Haunted Bookshop, as the the title seems to hint).

The time is shortly after WWI, and President Woodrow Wilson is soon to sail for Europe to craft the settlement that will create the League of Nations. Into Parnassus at Home enters Aubry Gilbert, a young advertising man, Titania Chapman, a rich debutante sent to work there by her father to learn some life skills, and a disappearing and reappearing copy of Carlyle’s Oliver Cromwell. The book is a bit of a love story, a bit of a thriller, and mostly a paean to books and reading.  Roger himself is, once again, an adorable character, if sometimes long-winded on his favorite subject — books, of course.

Why the “Haunted Bookshop” – here’s a quote that will explain:

…that’s why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of books I haven’t read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There’s only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it.

Booklovers will salivate over the descriptions of Roger’s cluttered but cozy secondhand bookstore and his fire-lit sitting room lined with his most cherished volumes.

My copies have these lovely illustrations –

There are many wonderful editions out there – so start your search now.  I won’t judge if you obtain copies for yourself as well.  As Henry Ward Beecher said:

When is human nature so weak as in a bookstore?