THE GOODS : A Gift to Last All Their Days : With themes that range from cats to comic strips to religion, calendars are one size fits all.
There are two shopping days left before Christmas which means it’s time to fill in the gaps on your list.
One solution: calendars. Unless you really love the mall on Christmas Eve, you can take care of everybody with one visit to a well-stocked bookstore or card shop. The calendar as gift has many virtues:
* Without being downright cheap, most calendars are affordable, falling into the $10 to $15 range.
* You don’t have to worry about sweater size, and calendars are square and easy to wrap in a hurry.
* A calendar will last for a year and can be used effortlessly at any minute of the day. Few gifts can match that for staying power.
* A calendar brings order and beauty to a chaotic world. “I always get the Sierra Club calendar and I couldn’t live without it,” says a stressed-out Los Angeles writer. “You open it, and there is a beautiful picture. That can be the high point of your week.”
* Best of all, you can dip into the vast variety of calendar subject matter and choose a gift so personal the recipient will think you spent a lot of time picking it out. “They will like you for 12 months,” says Ron Gutis of the new Border’s Books and Music in Westwood. “Or hate you if you give them one they don’t like.”
But that seems unlikely. Today’s calendar array beckons with the ultimate something-for-everyone appeal, having come a long way from that model we used to get every December from our insurance agent.
“Calendars are a big business and we have a great selection,” Gutis says. “Art and kids and animal lovers and films and movie stars and Madonna and the Beatles.”
“Every year we keep adding new subjects,” says Lilet Martinez at Workman Publishing in New York, a major calendar publisher. One of its award winners, “The Medieval Woman,” is a richly illustrated tapestry, with bibliography and enough history to be used for a textbook.
“We have a lot of different formats including wall calendars, desk diaries and page-a-day, which is our best-selling calendar style,” says Martinez. At the Calendar Marketing Assn. in Liberty, Ill., executive director Maria Tuthill confirms the calendar boom. “For the past six or seven years, it’s just grown and grown,” she says. “This year there are 5,000 titles available. It’s a $9-billion industry and the average American has four to five calendars. The most prominent one is in the kitchen.”
She says calendars have developed a lot more humor in the past few years. Gary Larson’s “Far Side” calendars sell in the millions, and movie and comic strip themes are popular, along with the perennial cats, dogs, gardens and landscapes.
“Angels are very big this year,” says Tuthill, “and those Magic Eye 3-D are also very hot.”
Not surprisingly, angels are popular at West Hollywood’s Bodhi Tree in West Hollywood, a spiritual bookstore. “Calendars have been very important for us in the last few years,” says co-manager Mike Brosnan, who carries calendars illustrating the religions of such groups as Tibetans and Native Americans.
“And astrological calendars with exact phases of the moon and positions of the planet, are very big for us, too--a lot of people consult them,” Brosnan says.
Rizzoli’s Bookstore in Santa Monica is not only selling a lot of angels, but also does a brisk business with “anything that looks vaguely classical or biblical,” says Mauricio Figuls, operations manager. “If a person just can’t think of what to get someone for a gift, a calendar is great. We have more than 200 selections--we’ve done real well with a Robert Mapplethorpe artwork calendar, and these very small CD-ROM-size styles with a jewel case have sold like crazy for stocking stuffers.”
Rizzoli’s expects to sell about half its stock before Christmas and, like other stores, will mark them down after Jan. 1. “They make a good cheap gift after the holidays, if you don’t celebrate Christmas,” Figuls says.
“People start buying in early August,” says Richard Labonte, general manager of A Different Light bookstores in San Francisco and West Hollywood. “We used to be hard-pressed to find six or eight calendars with gay and lesbian themes. This year we have 280 themes in stock, so you can’t go wrong picking a gift. You can make a romantic, or a political or a friendship statement.”
While calendar buying has gotten so complex some bookstores have sworn off completely, others thrive on the seasonal challenge. Vroman’s in Pasadena stocks 750 to 800 titles. “We have to turn the store upside down to do it,” says Stan Hynds, book department manager.
“Vroman’s has the reputation for having an extraordinary breadth of titles,” he says. “If you are looking for a wildflower calendar, you won’t find just one, you’ll have several to choose from. I think you could satisfy any potential gift-getter interest with the genres the calendars address these days.”
The best sellers are Sierra Club wall and engagement calendars, he says.
Vroman’s sells “a zillion kitty cat and dog” calendars. but this year’s hot mammal is the wolf, he adds. “We have 12 different wolf calendars, and we will sell out.”