The gift that keeps on giving

WHEN you give a classic work of literature to a friend, certain rules apply. One, you need to have read the book already. (There’s no way around this.) Two, the book has to “fit” your relationship; perhaps it is reminiscent of an ongoing conversation or some subject you have discussed or maybe there’s a character who reminds you of your friend. Three, the book must be a kind of artifact: a particular edition chosen for its beauty or nostalgia or readability or value or some combination thereof.

How to know what to give? In her recent “Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 246 pp., $22), Anne Fadiman distinguishes between reading and rereading: “The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story.” Fadiman’s comment reminds us that to give a favorite book is to see it again, to reread it through the eyes of its recipient. For Nicholas A. Basbanes, on the other hand, what’s important is the book as object. “It is with no small measure of satisfaction to note that most of the books used and cited within these pages,” he writes in the acknowledgments to his new book, “Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World” (HarperCollins: 360 pp., $29.95), “have come from my own shelves, one small testament to the merits of lifelong accumulation.” When we give a book, we are adding to a library; our gift will not only find its way into a friend’s heart and soul but also deserve a lifelong spot on his or her shelf.

If you find yourself at a loss for possibilities, it might be helpful to consult one of the many lists of “Great Books”: the 50-volume “five-foot shelf” of Harvard Classics, for instance, or its additional 20-volume “shelf of fiction.” On the Internet, you can scroll through “The Lifetime Reading Plan” by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major, which suggests 133 titles, as well as Martin Seymour-Smith’s “The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written,” Kenneth Rexroth’s “Classics Revisited” and London’s Times Literary Supplement’s “The 100 Most Influential Books Since the War.”

Certain publishers help readers weed through these lists by reissuing classics: the Library of America, with its sleek black volumes; the Modern Library, whose covers sport portraits of the authors; and New York Review Books, which offers beautiful versions of works such as Georges Simenon’s “The Man Who Watched Trains Go By” (224 pp., $12.95) and “The New York Stories of Henry James” (592 pp., $16.95), selected and introduced by Colm Toibin. Even Barnes & Noble puts out a remarkably affordable hardcover classics imprint, as well as an equivalent series of paperbacks (a suspiciously large number of which are by Dickens) and a line of leather-bound omnibus editions, including “The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll” (1,166 pp., $19.95), and a volume titled “Wellsprings of Faith” (704 pp., $19.95) that contains “The Imitation of Christ,” “The Dark Night of the Soul” and “The Interior Castle.” I like the Carroll collection, but the “Wellsprings” volume suffers from too much meddling: Its three books should be digested over time. Seeing them crammed together has the feel of the one-room schoolhouse. Be on the lookout for unnecessary interference when it comes to classics. They are classics because they stand on their own.

Aesthetically, none of these editions has the heft and look of, say, a book from France’s Editions Gallimard, with its simple red type and black rules on the cover. And yet it is possible that with a few decades of fond handling, the Barnes & Noble Lewis Carroll could be the volume your granddaughter gives to her best friend.

Let us not forget the boxed set. This is, after all, how many children begin their lives as serious readers, by diving into series and striving to collect entire shelves. This year’s splashiest sets include the third volume of Leslie S. Klinger’s “The Annotated Sherlock Holmes” (W.W. Norton: 908 pp., $49.95), which features Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s four novels about the Victorian detective; the Holmes short stories were published in a two-book set last year. (Other Norton annotated editions include “The Annotated Brothers Grimm” [462 pp., $35], edited by Maria Tatar with an introduction by A.S. Byatt, and “The Annotated Christmas Carol” [288 pp., $29.95] by Charles Dickens, illustrated by John Leech, with an introduction, notes and bibliography by Michael Patrick Hearn.) HarperCollins has just issued a lovely box of three volumes from its Eminent Lives series: “Ulysses S. Grant” by Michael Korda, “George Washington” by Paul Johnson and “Thomas Jefferson” by Christopher Hitchens ($39.95 for the set). People who read lives of presidents never seem to get enough. The years drag on between books by David McCullough or Stephen Ambrose or Doris Kearns Goodwin. These will help bridge the gap.

Some reissues offer contemporary translations of established classics, giving them new life for our times. Mark Polizzotti’s rendering of Gustave Flaubert’s hilarious final novel “Bouvard and Pecuchet” (Dalkey Archive, 328 pp., $13.95) adds a bit of buzz to the story of a couple of clerks -- the original “Odd Couple” -- who retire to take up various hobbies. Other publishers have brought together multivolume works between two covers. One of my favorites is Penguin Classics’ new edition of “Kristin Lavransdatter” (1,146 pp., $25), 1928 Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset’s fierce epic of 14th century Norway, translated by Tina Nunnally, with an introduction by Brad Leithauser. It is comforting, in this instance, to have the entire work in one place.

Annotations and new translations are not for everyone. I tend to like them -- especially annotations, which is like getting two books (the raw text plus the history, sociology and linguistic analysis) for the price of one. But there are purists who consider them distractions, or even worse, newfangled gewgaws. For them, perhaps, it’s best to visit a secondhand or antiquarian bookseller who might carry an unusual edition of a particular work. Of course, there can be something noxious about book worship. Objects can be copied and cheapened; the experience of reading and the sharing of ideas cannot. (Never forget the rebel camp in Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” where people memorized the most subversive books and retold them to the next generation, rendering the objects obsolete.) Like all gifts, a favorite book or classic can backfire. I once gave an ex-boyfriend (in public, at a party) a copy of “Moby-Dick,” which caused all his old drinking buddies, as well as a few other ex-girlfriends also present, to howl with laughter.

Among my favorite book gifts are old field guides to local flora and fauna. (In this modern life, our roots get weak and sometimes need a bit of strengthening.) To my rare friends in business, I might give this year’s new edition of Sun Tzu’s “The Illustrated Art of War,” translated by Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford University Press: 288 pp., $25). For an old school friend, I’m thinking about the novels of Jane Austen. I’m going to give another, newer friend my grandfather’s copy of “The Peloponnesian Wars” by Thucydides, because I want to include her, somehow, in my past. For a friend in trouble with her marriage, I’m going to give the Lewis Carroll collection because Alice shrinks, expands and goes through so many doors yet seems to survive it all.

Life is short. It may not, in fact, be possible to read in a single lifetime all the books one should read. I read on average 50 pages per hour. That’s around a book a day (life will intervene), 365 a year. If I squeeze out another 40 years, that’s a mere 14,600 books, which simply will not do. For every classic you haven’t read and should, there are at least five new books you’ll want to read as well. But when it comes to giving a gift, few are more intimate than a book you’ve read, admired and reread. The message is: I want this relationship to last and last and last. *