'They have whole worlds inside of them': a brief journey into the practice of book gift giving through history

Abstract

This article analyses the practice of giving books as gifts through history, in Europe. It starts from the book as a ‘gift of power’ in the Merovingian and Carolingian time, going through the presenting of books amongst scholars as signs of friendship and professional appreciation, the book as ‘public gift’, and the emergence of the early nineteenth-century genre of ‘gift books’, to eventually reach the present days and the dispute between eBooks and physical books in gifting habits peculiar to the period. Wealth, symbolism, the ability to convey messages: different aspects are taken into consideration, to try and give reason of why books have always been considered so appropriate for gifting.