Imaginary gifts … books in Christmas wrapping. Photograph: Getty Images
Giving books as presents is a tricky business. Give the right person the right book at the right time and minor miracles can occur – horizons broadened, home truths revealed, the very landscape of an individual's mind changed for ever.
But influence works both ways. Give the wrong person the wrong book at the wrong time and the effects can be disastrous. One may inspire a life of debauchery, install a sense of Gothic paranoia, or – perhaps worst of all –prompt nothing but a resentful boredom.
As a collector of the inscriptions in second-hand books celebrated in my book of "the forgotten friendships, hidden stories and lost loves" that they suggest, I often wonder about their previous owners, and how and why the book came to be abandoned.
I can only hope that their secret histories are as interesting as my favourite examples of book-giving in fiction. My top 10 contains a mixture of real and fictional books – but, annoyingly, I was unable to find an example of Lovecraft's infamous Necronomicon ever being treated as a gift in his fiction. Anyone?
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But influence works both ways. Give the wrong person the wrong book at the wrong time and the effects can be disastrous. One may inspire a life of debauchery, install a sense of Gothic paranoia, or – perhaps worst of all –prompt nothing but a resentful boredom.As a collector of the inscriptions in second-hand books celebrated in my book of "the forgotten friendships, hidden stories and lost loves" that they suggest, I often wonder about their previous owners, and how and why the book came to be abandoned.
I can only hope that their secret histories are as interesting as my favourite examples of book-giving in fiction. My top 10 contains a mixture of real and fictional books – but, annoyingly, I was unable to find an example of Lovecraft's infamous Necronomicon ever being treated as a gift in his fiction. Anyone?
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