In Praise of the Greatest Gift of Them All: A Book

Thank God for bookies.

Not the kind who break legs. The kind who would rather get Patrick O’Brian’s new Aubery/Maturin nautical novel than a Palm Pilot.

Today, while the rest of the world discovers anew the hell that is retail shopping, you and I will take comfort in the book lovers for whom we buy.

We few, we happy few, don’t have to worry about size or color or whether the batteries are included. We have friends or family whose idea of a perfect gift is one that lets them leave the world behind without actually getting a divorce, being shipwrecked on a desert island or becoming a conservatively dressed talking mouse in a family of humans.

In other words, we have friends and family much like ourselves who would rather get a book, thank you.

Last Christmas, I knew my friend Maureen would smile as she opened her presents because I gave her both Harold Bloom’s massive book on Shakespeare and Anne Fadiman’s exquisite little examination of the reading life, “Ex Libris.” Maureen and I travel more or less at will in each other’s minds, and, thus, we know when we choose a book for the other that it will reflect some current fancy or preoccupation, expressed or not.

Like Maureen, another beloved friend would rather get books than stock options.

All he asks is that they be first editions and that the dust jackets be unfaded and unchipped. He is a lover, not only of books as celebrations of language and purveyors of ideas, but of books as objects. These people are easy to identify. They are the ones who actually went out and bought Henry Petroski’s book, currently in stores, “The Book on the Bookshelf.”

Such people were not surprised to learn that the ideal bookshelf is no more than 40 inches long because they had already experienced the heartache of sagging shelves that exceeded that length. On one of their bookshelves, they are likely to have Petroski’s earlier book of equally specialized interest, “The Pencil.”

Although my family is no more functional than yours, I am heartened by its tendency to turn out generation after generation of book people. My 9-year-old niece, Hannah, for example. Hannah was disappointingly subdued last year in her response to my gift of C.S. Lewis’s classic “Chronicles of Narnia.” I had the distinct impression she would have preferred something involving ponies.

But this year I think I got it right. I bought her the new Jean Craighead George book, “Frightful’s Mountain.” Published 40 years ago, George’s “My Side of the Mountain” is a haunting tale of a boy’s surviving in the wilderness. It was one of my son’s favorite books as a child, and “Frightful’s Mountain” completes the trilogy that also includes “On the Far Side of the Mountain.”

Hannah is both a reader and a third-generation birder, so fond of winged creatures that she used to take Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” to bed before she could read it because of the birds on the cover. I think she will be smitten with the George book as soon as she sees the cover portrait of the peregrine falcon of the title. Since the only thing better than a good book is a good series, I got her paperback copies of the two earlier books as well.

As I’ve wandered through bookstores in the last few weeks, I’ve seen no evidence that a single book is shaping up to be this holiday season’s blockbuster.

A call to Dutton’s in North Hollywood, one of the Valley’s handful of surviving independent bookstores, confirmed that suspicion.

“I don’t get a sense of one dominant book this year,” says Dave Dutton, who owns the store with wife, Judy.

The three Harry Potter books, which continue to top bestseller lists, will no doubt be bought as Hanukkah and Christmas gifts for the handful of children in the English-speaking world who have not yet read them.

Another book that is doing well at Dutton’s is “Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel.”

“My wife said, ‘This is going to be a big book,’ ” Dutton says of the collection of little-known wartime cartoons by the late Dr. Seuss.

“We’ve put out three stacks of them now and have had to reorder three times. There’s a real bite to them,” he says of the cartoons. “They’re very anti-fascist, as one would expect, and very funny, too.”

Holiday-time always sees the release of books calculated to appeal to men, famous for eschewing most fiction and enjoying books on such manly subjects as espionage and cryptography.

This year, Dutton predicts, “Blue at the Mizzen,” the 20th Aubery-Maturin novel, will sell briskly. The octogenarian O’Brian’s wildly popular series does indeed seem to function as a sort of Hardy Boys for smart, literate men. I know one who recently started reading them all over again.

Certain kinds of science books also do well with male readers. Steven Pinker, whose “How the Mind Works” was a bestseller, has a promising new title--”Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language.”

And Dutton clerk Anne Beaty says “Galileo’s Daughter” has been a steady seller at the store. This biography of the great astronomer’s illegitimate daughter, by Dava Sobel, who wrote the best-selling “Longitude,” “has done very well, in a very calm manner,” Beaty says. “It doesn’t matter how many we order, we only have one.”

“The French Laundry Cookbook” is moving well, and Dutton thinks the massive “Oxford Companion to Food” will also be a winner. (Weighing in at six pounds, the latter should probably be registered as a deadly weapon and should, under no circumstances, be stored on a shelf wider than 40 inches).

And if food doesn’t interest the readers on your list, there is always sleaze. Among Dutton’s bestsellers is Jim Heimann’s collection of tawdry tales and photos from the files of local tabloids, “Sins of the City: The Real Los Angeles Noir.”

“A bail-bondsman ordered 100 copies,” Dutton says, “for his clients, I guess.”

Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.