Gift Books for Homekeepers, Part Two

photo: Eric Diesel

When John and I moved cross-country, one consideration for our new urban home was room for our books. Neither of us can be left unsupervised in the book shop of a museum, or in a used bookstore. Time for reading is always included on our monthly household schedule. We each typically have going a novel, something spiritual, and something practical. John reads object histories and social commentary, neither of which I can concentrate on -- I focus on home writing and literary fiction. We both read vintage detective fiction from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler. My favorite book is On the Road and my favorite area of avocational study, Beat literature. As I suspect it did with many college kids of my generation, Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero led me to writing, and the adult me followed the Sideways path written out by Rex Pickett.

Our home library occupies the bulk of the space, with honors, in our home office. Our library includes John's medical library, philosophy and metaphysics, art and artists, travel, LGBTQ, reference including my writer's bookshelves, and fiction. For as long as I've kept house, I've maintained a curriculum library for homekeeping, organized by subject area. Each subject area is populated by titles that I share with readers in the popular Urban Home Blog feature Homekeeper's Library, in columns themselves organized, reflectively, by subject area. So far, areas of homekeeping covered in Homekeeper's Library have included cookbooks, gardening, crafts, bookstores themselves, and some favorite individual titles including Dorothy Draper's Decorating is Fun and the venerable, and personally meaningful, Better Homes and Gardens Sewing Book.

photo: Eric Diesel

Homekeeping letters are practical and inspirational, and many of them are quite beautiful. This is especially true of decorating, gardening, and cookbooks. The holidays are a time when we often splurge on coffee table books, but a beautiful book is a wonderful gift for any occasion, particularly birthdays and housewarmings. Gorgeous photography and stunning design don't just tell the tale that a design book is meant to tell, they teach aesthetics, an important but often dismissed element of daily living. It would be enough if they were, but aesthetics are not just about prettiness; they are about understanding the profound relationship between form and function that propels everything from flower arrangements to automobiles, from the clothes on our bodies to the buildings we inhabit. But a gift book doesn't have to be a gorgeous coffee table volume to be a great gift -- any book that is relevant, charming, or useful is a great gift.

As a writer and a reader, I love both to give and to receive books. A few years ago, living in the holiday chill of Astoria, Queens, I wrote a column about gift books for homekeepers. I still have those books, and still read them. Here, dispatched from the gaudy spirit of Christmas in LA, is the sequel to that column. It reflects my belief in the legitimacy of homekeeping letters as a topic both practical and scholarly. It indicates, though only touches upon, the breadth of this area of learning and doing, of design and function, of pretty pictures and practical results. Sneaking the lessons and tales of homekeeping in through a gift box is itself an aesthetic act and a slightly subversive one, and like all such, it is generous and useful at once. Accordingly, along with reading them, it's important for a homekeeper to know how to care for books. Click here for instructions for book care, and assemble book care supplies such as dust jacket covers, book plates, acid-free tissue, and a printout of Urban Home Blog's bookmark craft into a book box as a special gift for book lovers.

Gift Books for Homekeepers, Part Two

As with all guides at Urban Home Blog, this is not meant to be a comprehensive list but one of suggestions based on my own experience as a lifestyle writer and homekeeper. As always, none of these is a compensated endorsement.

Bar Books. A great bar book provides the same atmosphere of reverence for the art of drinking that a great bar does. Some of the best bar books are vintage finds from used bookstores; I still cherish the dozens I've sourced from a now-closed used bookshop in Solvang. Favorite titles from this trove include Esquire's Handbook for Hosts and Old Mr. Boston DeLuxe Official Bardtender's Guide. Every bartender needs a solid basic manual. While Dale DeGroff's The Craft of the Cocktail sets the standard, Charles Schumann's American Bar is a delightful supplement. Lost Recipes of Prohibition provides lore about the Eighteenth Amendment and understands the relationship between Prohibition and The Great Depression. Dr. Cocktail's Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails shares historic delight and a great deal of character regarding such title libations as the Leatherneck, the Aviation, and the Hemingway Daiquiri. I had long since satiated myself regarding the operatic story of the Negroni, but The Negroni: Drinking to La Dolce Vita is as beautiful as the vermilion hue of the liqueur that distinguishes it. Similar slim volumes in our homekeeper's library address The Old Fashioned and Vermouth. Pair The Saké Handbook with Japanese Cocktails and a saké set for a swank hostess gift. For perhaps the most appropriate gift of the season, give a beautiful book of Winter Cocktails along with a bottle of Kahlua, rum, or wine for the mulls, toddies, and Russians contained therein.

Baking. The winter holidays are the high-water mark for baking. Everyone exchanges, eats, exchanges some more, and eats some more cookies at Christmas. Both Lou Siebert Pappas' The Christmas Cookie Book and Betty Crocker's Cooky Book reissue lay out enough tempting recipes to keep up with the demand. Grunes and Van Vynckt's Very Merry Cookie Party provides plenty of tack for holiday cookie exchanges. If Christmas means candy, then Pappas' companion volume to the cookie book above, The Christmas Candy Book, walks home confectioners through the sparkling hard work of holiday candymaking. Every home baker needs an encyclopedic baking book. The three I turn to again and again are Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook, Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Pie and Pastry Bible, and, the mother of them all, Julia Child's Baking With Julia. Bakers who aspire to Tante Kringle's oven will appreciate Annie Rigg's darling Christmas Cupcakes, and Karen DeMasco's The Craft of Baking.

Collectibles. The stuff we surround ourselves with informs the living in our home as nothing else does. What we collect not only speaks to us, it speaks of us. The writers and editors of Better Homes and Gardens Collector's Style and Collections: Projects and Ideas understand this, and pack these volumes with display ideas from streamlined to fussy. Retro style is on display in Magnificent Obsessions, where notable collectors display and discuss their prides and joys. If any area contained therein grabs your interest, Abbeville's collectible volumes about collectibles include salt and pepper shakers, vintage tv lamps, matchbooks, ugly neckties, and snow globes. Smart collectors stay informed with price guides. One of the fundamental collections in our urban home is matinee cowboy memorabilia, and Box Office Buckaroos, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Toys and Memorabilia and Hakes's Guide to Cowboy Collectibles not only keep us apprised on appraisals, but inspire us by informing us of must-haves. Those pricing guides and inspirational volumes are invaluable when scavenging flea markets, tag sales, auctions, and online. Titles addressing flea-market style include Mary Randolph Carter's American Junk, Kitchen Junk, and Big City Junk; and Martha Stewart Living's Good Things From Tag Sales and Flea Markets.

Design. Nothing is more beautiful than a design book, but nothing requires greater discernment that choosing and gifting a design volume. It does a disservice to design to treat its treatises as props; give, and in your own home display, those that mean something within the household. We discussed some stunners in the inaugural gift books column, including Living With Wine and Class Act: William Haines: Legendary Hollywood Decorator. These deserve their coffee tables and pin spots, as do Andrée Putman: Complete Works and Edith Head: The Fifty Year Career of Hollywood's Greatest Costume Designer. Industrial Chic memorializes the less grandiose but inarguably pivotal influence of industrial design by examining its key accomplishments. Sills and Huniford's Dwellings celebrates living with design in a compact, but no less high-style, volume. The concept and execution of home design do not get more fundamental than Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, the companion volume to a MOMA exhibition that addressed housing, or any of Dover's collections of historical blueprints, such as 500 Small Houses of the Twenties. But perhaps the most thoughtful design book for homekeepers is the postwar novel Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, whose charms are so universal it has inspired a classic film and countless readers, homekeepers, and dreamers.

Resources

Urban Home Blog instructions for book care

Urban Home Blog bookmark craft