Chapter iv · The Why Library

The gift that stays.

The first gift book was published in 1822. It was meant to be given at Christmas, kept on a hall table, and pulled down in the New Year by the person to whom it had been given.

Forget-Me-Not, and the Regency invention of the gift book.

The slim leather-bound volume that founded the form was called Forget-Me-Not, published in London by Rudolph Ackermann in 1822. It contained poems and engravings, was bound in tooled leather, gilt-edged, and small enough to hold. It was the first of the so-called gift annuals — books designed not for the bookshelf but for the giving. Within a decade there were dozens of them: Heath's Book of Beauty, The Keepsake, Friendship's Offering. They were inexpensive, abundant, and short-lived as a commercial form. As an idea, they have proved unusually durable.

What the annuals established — and what later gift books inherited — was the convention of the book-as-keepsake. The text mattered, but so did the binding, the gilt edge, the inscription on the flyleaf naming both giver and recipient. The object was meant to outlast the occasion of its giving by some considerable margin. In a culture that gave very few durable objects between adults, the gift book filled a small but specific gap. It said: I have chosen something for you that I expect you to keep. The mode of address has not entirely changed.

Kelmscott, the Doves Press, and the book made on purpose.

The private-press movement, which began with William Morris's founding of the Kelmscott Press in 1891, took the keepsake idea and made it the entire enterprise. Morris was, in part, reacting against the industrial book — the cheap, ill-bound novel produced in tens of thousands for an indifferent market. His Kelmscott books, by contrast, were limited editions, hand-set, printed on dampened paper, bound in vellum, and intended to be objects in themselves. T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, who had bound for Morris before founding the Doves Press in 1900, wrote of the "book beautiful" as a thing whose form and content were inseparable.

The anthropological frame is worth a moment here. Marcel Mauss, in his 1925 Essai sur le don, argued that gifts are never freely given; they create durable bonds between giver and recipient, and the durability of the object often does the work the relationship asks of it. A book that survives on a shelf for fifty years is doing some version of that work continuously, without being asked. The Regency annuals knew this. Morris knew this. The modern single-book studio knows it too, and inherits the convention: the keepsake is what the giver has chosen to make difficult to throw away.

What survives, and the long arithmetic of one shelf.

Not every gift book has survived. The Regency annuals are largely gone, their cheap leather long since perished, their gilt rubbed off by the hands of three or four generations. The Kelmscott books, made for the long shelf rather than the hall table, are mostly still here — in libraries, in private collections, occasionally at auction. The difference is not sentimental. It is bookbinding. A book that has been perfect-bound, matte cover, and stored in normal indoor conditions will, in the boringly empirical sense, outlast its first reader by an order of magnitude.

The book is still on the shelf in the next house, and the one after that.

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Cited.

• Ackermann, R. (ed.) (1822–1847). Forget-Me-Not: a Christmas, New Year's, and Birthday Present. London: R. Ackermann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forget_Me_Not_(annual)
• Morris, W. (1893). A note by William Morris on his aims in founding the Kelmscott Press. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40724
• Cobden-Sanderson, T. J. (1924). The ideal book or book beautiful. Hammersmith: Doves Press. https://archive.org/details/idealbookorbookb00cobd
• Mauss, M. (1925). Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques. L'Année Sociologique, n.s., 1, 30–186. (English: The Gift, trans. W. D. Halls, 1990, Routledge.)
• Hofer, P. (1958). The artist and the book, 1860–1960. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts.

a storybook no one else has ever read.