One of my all-time favourite books is a slim volume of essays by Anne Fadiman, [amazon_link id=”0140283706″ target=”_blank” ]Ex Libris[/amazon_link]. It’s a book about books.

[amazon_image id=”0140283706″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader[/amazon_image]

Although this passage in the final essay, Secondhand Prose, is about a birthday and not Christmas (and is hardly to do with economics at all – non-pecuniary utility, maybe?), it speaks volumes about how to choose the perfect present:

“On the morning of my forty-second birthday, George informed me that I was about to be spirited to a mystery destination. I followed him to the subway. We got off at Grand Central Station, where he commanded me to stand at a discreet distance during his sotto voce procurement of two round-trip tickets to somewhere. After a half-hour’s ride through the Bronx and Yonkers, we disembarked at a town called Hastings on Hudson. What could possibly await us here? A three-star restaurant? A world-class art collection? A hot-air balloon, stocked with a magnum of Veuve Cliquot and a pound of caviar, from which we would achieve a hawk’s eye view of the Hudson Valley?…Then I saw it: a weather-beaten little shop, perched on such a declivitous slope that it looked in danger of sliding into the Hudson River, with a faded blue sign over the door that said BOOKSTORE. Inside were an unkempt desk, a maze of out-of-plumb shelves and 30,000 used books.

“Seven hours later, we emerged from the Riverrun Bookshop carrying nineteen pounds of books. (I weighed them when we got home.)

“Now you know why I married my husband.”

Of course, nobody will be so foolish as to buy me a Kindle this Christmas….

In St Malo