The Battle for Christmas (26 page)

Many Gift Books were ornate, with gilt edges, lavish bindings, expensive engravings, and colored “presentation plates.” But they came at all price levels. James Gordon Bennett’s
New York Herald
noted in the depression year 1840 that Gift Books “come within the range of the means of most persons, varying in price from $3 to $15;” and it added pointedly: “There are few that would wish to give a lady a present of a less value than $3.”
^22
*

Gift Books were compiled whenever possible by a popular author whose name on the title page could be expected to guarantee added sales. They could be put together fast, in a matter of weeks if necessary. In 1837, one apologetic editor publicly acknowledged that the decision to compile his Gift Book “only suggested itself to the Publisher a fortnight before the last sheet was put to press,” and that the work had to be completed so quickly because the publisher wished it to “appear at the season when the annuals and other similar publications are most in request.”
²³
Nowadays such books are called quickies.

Gift Books have been studied to show their influence in disseminating literature and art to the American public. They have also been studied, more than any other genre of printed matter, as physical objects, examples of the “materiality” of literary culture: to show that books were not only read but also gazed at, fondly handled, and proudly displayed. What I wish to add here is a point that it is easy to overlook: Gift Books were marketed as
presents
, purchased only to be given away. Indeed, as far as I can determine, Gift Books were the
very first
commercial products of any sort that were manufactured specifically, and solely, for the purpose of being given away by the purchaser. And, of course, they were to be given away during the Christmas season. The overwhelming majority of Gift Books bore as their subtitle the phrase “A Christmas and New Year’s Gift” (or “Present”). That is why they were often so physically ornate: Christmas was the appointed time for luxury spending. Once again, the case of Gift Books suggests the manner in which Christmas was consciously used by entrepreneurs as an agent of commercialization, an instrument with which to enmesh Americans in the web of consumer capitalism.

For at least one major publishing house (and probably others), Gift Books represented the single-largest venture of the business year. The Philadelphia firm of Carey & Lea invested heavily in the production of
The Atlantic Souvenir
. In 1829 and again in 1830, the firm printed 10,500 copies of this very popular Gift Book, at a cost of more than $12,500 each year; in 1830 this sum came to more than 30 percent of their
total
production costs for the year. (The $12,500 included printing costs and payments to the books editor and its contributors, but the single most expensive item, easily exceeding all the authors’ payments combined, was the book’s engravings.) But Carey & Lea hoped for a substantial return on their investment: if the press run sold out, they would take in $17,386, for a net profit of almost 40 percent.
²⁴

Gift Books were marketed with aggressive new techniques. For example, they commonly contained their own advertisements—not tucked away in the back pages but inscribed within the literary matter itself. (This was especially true of Gift Books that were intended for children.) Sometimes this self-advertising took the general form of a story or poem in which a character insisted that books (and especially Gift Books) made the best presents. Take
The Violet
for 1837 (edited by Eliza Leslie, whom we have encountered before as the author of the story about young Robert Hamlin’s Philadelphia shopping excursion). This volume contains a poem in which four young siblings discuss the Christmas presents they would like to receive. Three of the four indicate that they are hoping for toys. But the fourth child, an older sister, knows that children will quickly lose interest in toys. What she wants instead are books—and a Gift Book most of all:

Often poems such as this named the very Gift Book in which they appeared. The 1840 preface to a children’s Gift Book,
The Annualette
, contained this typical verse:

Sometimes such verse even advertised other volumes on the publisher’s list. For example,
The Pearl
was published by the Philadelphia firm of Ash and Anners, which also published a periodical named
Parleys Magazine
. Sure enough, a poem in
The Pearl
for 1836 has a father who tells his children, as he is handing them their presents:

And in the very next number of
The Pearl
, for 1837, one story ends with a group of children opening their Christmas presents. “‘I am so glad that I have got
The Pearl,’
“one says, and a second chimes in after opening another holiday book brought out by the same publishers: “‘I have
The Boys’ Week-Day Book
—I have wanted it so much.’”
²⁶

Even Santa Claus got into the act. The preface to a Gift Book first published in 1842 as
St. Nicholas’s Book
conveyed the point that it had been put together directly on the personal instructions of St. Nicholas himself, who desired to have a book “made exactly to his mind for the Christmas of this year” and who therefore “applied to the author to make one, to be called ‘St. Nicholas’s Book for All Good Boys and Girls.’” The preface noted, simply, “Here it is.” And it continued:

When they were manufactured as presents for adults, Gift Books were often ornate and luxurious to the eye and hand. Commonly, they were named to suggest their resemblance to other kinds of beautiful luxury objects, notably jewels or flowers, both of which were also popular as
Christmas presents (the latter were newly available in winter through commercial hothouses). Thus, for jewelry, there were the
Amaranth, Amethyst, Amulet, Brilliant, Coronet, Diadem, Gem, Gem of the Season, Jewel, Literary Gem, Lyric Gem, Opal, Pearl
, and
Ruby
. For flowers, there were
Autumn Leaves, Bouquet, Christmas Blossoms, Dahlia, Dew-Drop, Evergreen, Floral Offering, Flowers of Loveliness, Garland, Hyacinth, Iris, Laurel Wreath, Lily, Lily of the Valley, Magnolia, May Flower, Moss-Rose, Primrose, Rose, Rose Bud, Violet, Winter-Bloom, Wintergreen, Woodbine
, and
Wreath
.

Gift Books were probably among the most expensive books many Americans had ever purchased. Take the experience of a rather prosperous man, John Davis of Worcester, Massachusetts. (A future governor of Massachusetts, he was then serving in the U.S. Congress.) On December 26, 1826, Davis wrote to his wife that he had visited a Washington bookstore and bought her a “very beautiful” Gift Book:

Davis admitted here that he had been tempted to buy “many things” that were more expensive than he was used to purchasing. But he did spend $5 on a single book for his wife—and he let her know it (which suggests that he was not used to spending so much money on books).

I
T WOULD
be unfair to conclude that these books were purchased and given away simply as a display of conspicuous consumption. Christmas gifts had to be (or appear to be) expressions of personal sentiment, designed to signify or enhance intimate personal bonds—bonds between parents and children, husbands and wives, suitors and those they courted. And that is surely what parents, husbands, and suitors wanted them to be. Such Christmas presents were intended above all to represent an
expression of feeling
. This meant that they were to be given freely, out of affection, and not as part of an old-fashioned gift exchange offered in
fulfillment of an obligation. The
Herald’s
new rival, Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
, put this point quite clearly in 1846: “The season approaches when Good Wishes take visible, palpable form, becoming active in the shape of Gifts…. To give and receive the free will offerings of Friendship and Affection are among the purest pleasures permitted to this state of being….” Greeley stressed that such “free will offerings of Friendship and Affection” had nothing in common with the traditional exchange of gifts for goodwill:

That was why it was so important for the gift to stand outside the realm of ordinary day-to-day needs, to be a luxury item and never what Greeley called “a matter of homely necessity or mere mercantile utility.” “In short, it should not so much satisfy a want as express a sentiment, speaking a language which if unmeaning to the general ear, is yet eloquent to the heart of the receiver.”
²⁹

Greeley knew that spouses and lovers often presented such Gift Books to each other. And an editorial puffin the
New York Herald
in 1839, describing the “splendid volumes” of Gift Books on sale at the local bookshops, suggested that they would make the best possible present for the “one beloved object,” the “cherished flower of affection” in their lives. The notice concluded pointedly: Such presents say, “in language not to be mistaken, ‘Forget me not.’”
³⁰

In other words, the presentation of a Gift Book could be used as part of the courtship process, as a way of deepening a personal relationship or signaling a willingness to do so. That often meant treading a delicate line—to be personal and sincere yet not
too
intimate. As the preface to one Gift Book phrased the matter:

There was a problem here. Whether Gift Books were used by suitors or by affectionate parents, there was an inherent tension between the message they were intended to convey and the fact that they were actually
mass-produced and mass-marketed commodities. Given the personal weight such gifts were meant to carry, that was hardly appropriate. It was crucial that they be able to conceal the facts of their own production and distribution—to disguise their origins, in other words.

One reason that Gift Books made such successful Christmas gifts is that they managed to do that job very well. (In the antebellum years, as now, both jewels and flowers seemed to do the job, too, since they were not only beautiful luxury goods but also objects that could be represented as the creations of nature. This was another reason so many Gift Books were named for jewels and flowers.) Sometimes the very title of a Gift Book indicated the sentiment it was meant to carry: thus
Souvenir
itself (meaning something to be remembered), but also
Affections Gift, Forget Me Not, Friendships Offering, Gift of Friendship, Keepsake, Leaflets of Memory, Memento
(subtitled “A Gift of Friendship”),
Remember Me, Token
, and
Token of Friendship
. Both
The Pearl
and
The Rose
were subtitled “Affections Gift,” and in that way associated jewelry and flowers, respectively, with personal feelings—with the world of domestic affections, not the world of commodity production.

The publishers of Gift Books took pains to give their products a personalized look. Of course,
any
book given as a present could be personalized by means of an inscription on the flyleaf, giving the name of the giver and the recipient (and their relationship), and adding the date on which the book was presented. But Gift Books went further than that. Ironically, the very techniques of mass production were employed to make Gift Books appear personal and unique, to convey the impression that they were customized, even handmade, products. At the frontispiece of each volume, there typically appeared a special introductory page known as a “presentation plate”—an engraving expressly designed to be written on by the buyer of the book, to personalize it and make the presentation itself an intrinsic part of the book.

Some presentation plates contained room for the purchaser not only to fill in his name and the name of the person who was to receive the book but even to compose a phrase that indicated the precise degree or quality of affection he wished the present to convey. Thus the presentation plate in
The Token
for 1833 (a Gift Book that also happened to include three newly published stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne) left an empty line in which the purchaser was to fill in just what the book was a token of. (In the copy of this volume owned by the American Antiquarian Society, a man named Waldo Flint has written that his present to Rebekah Scott