The Gift of Books

By Doug Moe

         Call me biased, but I can find all kinds of reasons why books make the best gifts, hands down.
         To receive a special book is to literally be given a gift for a lifetime. I still pull down from the shelf every Christmas the book my mom gave me in 1977.
         Giving a book to a friend or family member – especially a book that you love yourself – can also open a lasting dialog.
         So, is it better to give, or receive, a good book?
A few years ago, my friend Ron Seely – a former Wisconsin State Journal reporter – and his grown son, Will, unknowingly solved this dilemma by each buying the other Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone for Christmas.
It’s not every family for whom Hunter Thompson encompasses the Christmas spirit.
With the help of my wife, Jeanan, I recently asked a number of people – friends, acquaintances, strangers on Monroe Street – to share a brief story about the gift of a book, given or received, that meant something special to them.
I might note here that the Christmas 1977 book from my mom was a collection of newspaper columns by a Chicago writer named Jack Griffin. I was in college, an English major, but devouring the Chicago newspapers – available at Rennebohm’s – and wondering if I could one day write for newspapers myself.
I read about “Grif,” the name of the collection, in the Chicago Sun-Times. Griffin had died and his son assembled the book.
What made the gift special beyond the book itself – Griffin wrote beautiful sports features – was how hard it was for my mom to find. I had mentioned it only in passing.
An independent bookstore – hurrah! – finally helped her track down the small publisher, Greatlakes Living Press, and the book arrived Christmas Eve.
On the giving side, let me just quickly say that I owe a thanks to the late Jim Harrison, whose book The Woman Lit by Fireflies I gave to Jeanan on an airplane trip before we were married. I honestly think the title novella helped seal the deal for me.
Nick Chiarkas, author of Weepers – available at Mystery to Me – and the former director of Wisconsin’s public defender office, had a quick response when asked about the gift of a book that continues to resonate.
“When I was laid up in an Army hospital,” Chiarkas said, “a very kind USO woman gave me a collection of books and stories by J. D. Salinger.”
After reading and enjoying Salinger, Chiarkas – “naively,” he said – sent the famously reclusive author a fan letter addressed only to Salinger in Cornish, New Hampshire. Not only did it arrive, Salinger responded, in a letter dated April 9, 1965.
“I am at best a one-shot letter writer,” the Catcher in the Rye author wrote, “but would like you to know that I am grateful for that letter of yours. I see that you’re in an Army hospital. Not the best place in the world to be, I recall very well. Recover quickly.”
There was another line or two in the typed letter, and then Salinger’s handwritten signature. Fifty-one years later, it still hangs framed on Chiarkas’s wall.
Pam Coshun – known to Madison television audiences as Pam Tauscher, and now married to the broadcaster Craig Coshun – said Craig bought Bruce Degen’s Daddy is a Doodlebug for their oldest son’s first Christmas. Craig inscribed it with the message they would read together always. It started a tradition of an inscribed book every Christmas for each of their sons – “one of our most anticipated gifts every year,” Pam said.
John Roach, screenwriter (“The Straight Story”) and Madison Magazine columnist, holds special The Writer’s Desk, by Jill Krementz, a gift from his wife, Diane.
“An illustrated book that shows the desks, rooms, and vistas used by the greatest writers of the 20th century,” Roach noted. “The writers themselves offered brief descriptions of how and where they do their writing, and what they do to get the words on the page… A practical but amazing study on the pursuit of creativity.”
UW Health spokeswoman Lisa Brunette recalled a gift that resonated with her late husband, Dean Showers.
“One year,” Brunette said, “I replaced Dean’s well-loved copy of A Sand County Almanac with a full-color copy. But what most touched him was the reproduction of Aldo Leopold’s handwriting on the inside front cover. It made his hero a little more accessible.”
For civil rights attorney Jeff Scott Olson, the book is Simple Justice, Richard Kluger’s history of civil rights litigation culminating in Brown vs. Board of Education.
“I had to buy my own copy,” Olson said, “but I loved it so much that I bought a special chair to sit in and read it in my bedroom. For many years, while it was in print, I gave a new copy to every law student who worked for me as a clerk.”
Another Madison attorney, Dean Strang, who one year ago this month was about to become famous in the Netflix series “Making a Murderer,” has gifted to numerous friends Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
“An Italian physicist,” Strang noted, “Rovelli manages in hardly more than 90 pages both a near-poetic summary of what humankind knows, and does not know, about the physical space in and around us, and a beautiful meditation on how to be human in that space.”
On a somewhat lower plane, Barb Snell, former director of Madison’s Access Community Health Center, now living outside Orlando, appreciates her grandmother’s cookbook, which Barb received as a gift from her mother.
“It has my grandmother’s handwritten comments written in the margins,” Snell said. “Most of her comments were about tweaks she made to the recipe but my favorite was next to a recipe called ‘Never Fail Fudge.’ She wrote, ‘NOT TRUE!’ Cracks me up every time I see it.”
There is a lesson here. A fudge recipe may fail. The gift of a book – never.
 

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