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Okay, in the previous article I may have strained the pocketbook with my suggestion for giving yourself or someone else a place at the Book Seminar in Colorado next summer. If your budget won't allow for that, there are other great gift ideas for the bookseller in your life.
My favorite stocking stuffer is Bill McBride's Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions or any one of his other publications.
For something more substantial that you can wrap in a box for under the tree, consider the Ahearn's Guide for Collected Books or any of the other reference books in our bookshelf link on Bookologist.com.
Reference works add to a seller's library and are useful to the trade. Even if you inadvertently give a book already owned, your copy can be the one they take "on the road" or pass on to a friend.
If you're sick to death of books and really don't want to overlap work with the holiday, treat yourself to something to take you away from all that. Buy a giant poster of the beach and package it with a "sounds of the surf" tape. When you're answering the inquiries clogging up your email, you can pretend you're working from your computer in the tropics.
One of the best gifts I gave myself one year was a pair of woolen fingerless gloves from Scotland. My biggest gripe about having a shop is that the opening door in the winter blows in some frigid wind that numbs my hands. My nifty little gloves keep me warm, yet allow me to continue listing books for sale without constraint.
Now, if you're sitting there, perplexed and thinking about ways to drop hints for what you want, use this article to break the ice. And we'd love to hear from our readers after Christmas to see what Santa brought that will be useful for booksellers.
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