The Perfect Gift?
Many of us know that books make great gifts, and that there is something very special about that perfect book for an important person in one’s life. Yesterday at the shop, I heard perhaps the greatest story in my career to date, illustrating this very concept. One of our regular customers, who I have seen before, but with whom I had not had a chance to converse at length, came to the counter with her selections. An inquiry about which hardcover copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot she should buy turned into a discussion of the advantages of different translations from the Russian. To borrow a phrase from Elaine on Seinfeld, yada yada yada… the customer ends up telling me that,...