Well-Read Life™

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

Partnering for Good with Levenger Products

At Levenger we express our support of lifelong learning mainly through the products we create and sell. These products are designed to be helpful, and sometimes inspirational, to people who are pursuing their professional and avocational work involving reading, writing and thinking.

We also support lifelong learning through the financial support of the Levenger Foundation, which provides small but important grants directly to libraries, literacy groups and the National Book Foundation.

And happily, we also support lifelong learning by combining these two approaches. We do this by partnering with libraries, museums and other institutions to create products from their collections and paying them a portion of the proceeds. We call it Partnering for Good. It’s part of a movement today generally described as Conscious Capitalism.

In the last twenty years, social good has been accomplished by profit-making companies (beyond the normal good of creating jobs and advancing the economy). Companies like The Grameen Bank, The Body Shop in the UK, and Patagonia and Whole Foods in the US have demonstrated on a large scale how company profits and social profits can be mutually reinforcing. In our small way, Levenger has been doing similar things.

On the video below is a gallery of some of the products we've created with nonprofit institutions since our first partnership with The New York Public Library in 1993. Perhaps you own one of these products. That makes you a partner in our Partnering for Good—you’ve already helped lifelong learning more than you may know.

Since Partnering for Good began, Levenger has paid more than $160,000 in earned contributions to nonprofit institutions.

As always, we're interested in hearing of more institutions in the United States and worldwide that would like to partner with Levenger in such fashion. We would consider it a favor if you'd make an introduction.

Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

With best wishes,

Steve

Click on the video below:

In 1993, just six years after our start, Levenger partnered with The New York Public Library to reproduce the handsome brass desk lamps in its famed reading room. Levenger sold the lamps and paid a royalty to the library. Since that first lamp, we've worked with many institutions to create other equally enlightened products.

Levenger Toy Story 2: for ages 3 and up (and up and up)

“Get back to the presents,” instructs the young lad to the memory-keeper and narrator in Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. There were useful presents and some not so in Thomas’s charming recollection of his childhood holidays.

At Levenger, we offer only useful presents—and this is the first holiday season ever where we bring you educational games and toys. But while our toys instruct, they also beguile, beckoning both children and grownups to join in the fun. And that’s the real magic behind our selection. They’re a chance to trade Wii for we and bring the generations together. How very useful indeed.

Have a three-year-old, a tween, a teenager on your list? Our merchants have some suggestions for you.

For the littlest readers (ages 3+). Endearing wooden blocks in their own pull wagon spell F-U-N with A-B-Cs. They’re lovingly made by a family-owned American business, passed down from father to son. Instant heirloom: we’ll personalize the wagon.

More fathers and sons: it was Frank Lloyd Wright’s son John who invented Lincoln Logs,  and they still lure curious little hands. So do seemingly simple wooden blocks and marbles when they become a European-style marble run.

Young readers need places and spaces to call their own. Why not give them their own, kid-sized hideaway reading tent, bookcase or desk?

Ideal for the smarty-pants (6+).   A simple game of matching colors and shapes is smarter than it seems. Qwirkle has earned a Mensa award.  

Calling all strategy meisters (8+). Get the tweens on your list thinking about strategic thinking. Eight is the magic age to begin playing games that involve strategy. All three of these games—Dao, Quantumino and Monumental—have “strategy” in their names. These are excellent opportunities for bringing in other-generation perspectives. The kids might even think you’re smarter than you seem. 

Best in geek and green. Snap Circuits held every guy at Levenger in thrall, and quite a few of the women as well. All those cool ways to make a doorbell work and a light switch go on! (And all safely battery-powered.) From battery power to solar and wind power—these are two of several eco explorations your favorite environmentalist can embark on with the Power House Science Kit.

The families that play together.  We culled the time-tested and traditional for what we think are some of the best of the classics: Scrabble in a deluxe edition, Wooden Dominoes and our own Crossword Dice, and our game-room-in-a-box. Checkers, chess, backgammon, cribbage, cards—there’s a reason why these nostalgic names and games are still around. 

For train buffs and puzzle nuts.  If the very words Lionel Train Set make your pulse beat a little faster for a time when life was slower, come aboard this Christmas model.

And for puzzle lovers, our exclusive woodcut puzzle takes a page from the Bodleian Library’s medieval manuscripts and Alexander the Great. The whimsies are sure to seduce. These are the puzzle pieces shaped liked the dragons and angels and knights on grand horses in the picture. 

Has this gift list helped yours? I do hope so. Let me know if there are other toys and games that you would recommend—both those in our selection and those  that you wish were. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments.)

By the way, all of our toys and games come with a message for the grownups: be sure to succumb to the joy of childhood wonder this holiday. As Dylan Thomas knew so well, it’s the stuff of happy memory.

P.S. Mim Harrison, the editor of Levenger Press, collaborated with me on this blog.