Christmas Presents You Can Touch, and Be Touched By

If there’s any time of the year when the physical still matters—the feel of a rich paper, the smell of a good leather, the heft of a fine pen—surely it’s at holiday time. The allure of gifts you want to touch and that will touch those you present them to is powerful.

Perhaps they’re our validation that we are still human, and not virtual, beings after all. We know the magic of touch.

And so with a bit of cosmic justice in this year when e-book technology revolutionized the way we read, we use some technology ourselves to tell customers about our good old papery books. The result is the two short videos you see here:

Traditions to literally hold onto

Last month I had the honor of hearing rock-music legend Patti Smith stand tearfully in front of a crowd at the National Book Awards, seconds after her Just Kids was announced the nonfiction winner. “Please,” she said, ”no matter how we advance technologically, please never abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

As the publishers of the few but uncommon beautiful books of Levenger Press, we couldn’t agree more.

These two books— The Fantasia of Leonardo and Henry David Thoreau on Cape Cod—as always, are available only from Levenger. We hope that all the objects we create give you such singular satisfaction in their giving and their receiving.

Can videos such as these short ones above be used successfully to sell print books? It’s a novel idea. Just click on the Comments link below with your thoughts. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments.)

Happy holidays from your grateful, book-loving merchant,

Steve

Comments

[Dick Davies]

Thanks, Steve!

Shows me what I want to do with videos. And yes, they will sell books, because they show the value, not the books.

[Richard Pocker]

Steve:

I love books. We sold our house in September and put our possessions in storage for a year while we travel around the world.

What I miss most are the 95 cases of books and my Levenger library furniture.

That being said, I recently bought a Kindle to travel with. I have become a convert.

The dictionary function is the tipping point. Being able to look up words and the pronunciation easily is just a fantastic perk.

While I would not dream of getting rid of my books, I probably would read the book first on Kindle and then purchase a used copy for my library later.