A gifted book doesn’t need a personal touch, but it’s special when it has one.
A gifted book doesn’t need a personal touch, but it’s special when it has one.
A book-averse friend sent me Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven this week, in which she wrote: “Thank you for inspiring me to develop a love for reading.” She’s a sucker for notes, and I’m a sucker for books. The two loves relate but rarely collaborate in our friendship; I’m bad at responding to her notes, and she’s still promising to read a novel I gave to her last year. This gesture, an inscription that told me a book reminded her of our friendship, was perfect.
Readers and writers both need their “why”s: why to read a thing, and why to write a thing. Blurbs on the backs of books can help readers understand what a story is about. But a dedication is a tribute to an author’s seriousness; it must sum up their reason for writing on just one page and, in many cases, in just one sentence.
Inscriptions are similar — they’re just a chance to dedicate the act of reading, instead of writing. If you’re a book purist who can’t stand the thought of mucking up pages with your own words, at least attach a note. Either way, gifted books are best when they have a personal touch.
Although authors’ dedications are more serious than inscriptions (authors do, after all, write the novels), their dedications are a good place to start in crafting your own.
William F. Buckley Jr. did it best, as usual, in God and Man at Yale, when he wrote: “For God, for country, and for Yale. . . in that order.” Alexandra DeSanctis in her book on the post-Roe abortion regime, Tearing Us Apart, writes: “For my parents, who gave me the gift of life.”
A personal message might be important to your intended reader. I once gave a Protestant friend a copy of Trent Horn’s Why We’re Catholic, and added the note, “Read it and weep.” He later wept at the altar, upon his conversion. I won’t claim responsibility, of course, but one day I hope the book at least triggers a happy memory.
When I started at National Review, my journalism professor-turned-colleague, John J. Miller, added a note to Buckley’s Saving the Queen: “Don’t immanentize the eschaton (it’s an NR joke, look it up).” I did look it up, and you should too, so you can agonize with me if Mr. Miller meant that I too often forget the limits of human nature, or if he meant that I aspire beyond my ability, or if he meant that I shouldn’t expect too much, or if he meant to simply offer encouragement that all the good and just things in this world don’t rival eternity in the next. That one was tricky, and he could’ve just gone with, “Congrats.” But, now every time I see the book, I’m reminded of Buckley, Mr. Miller, and a legacy in which I’m quite blessed to share. A gifted book doesn’t need a personal touch, but it’s special when it has one.
The times I haven’t inscribed a book haunt me. How should someone remember the intention behind a gifted book without a note? I recently gave a journalist a copy of Richard Reeves’s Of Boys and Men, hoping that he would write about it. I told him in person that I thought his style and Reeves’s arguments would match well. But if he picks up the book in 20 years, he might not remember that time someone liked his writing enough to ask for more.
There are longer dedications, too. John Steinbeck famously dedicated East of Eden to his friend and editor Pascal “Pat” Covici:
Dear Pat,
You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, “Why don’t you make something for me?”
I asked you what you wanted, and you said, “A box.”
“What for?”
“To put things in.”
“What kind of things?”
“Whatever you have,” you said.
Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts — the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.
And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.
And still the box is not full.
JOHN
Steinbeck attached this dedication to his manuscript, which he sent to Pat in a hand-carved wooden box. That’s an elite gesture, reserved for special occasions.
C. S. Lewis dedicated The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe to his goddaughter Lucy, saying:
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather.
Authors might be happy to know that readers like their books enough to pass them on, and include a little message. It adds something special to one’s library: A remembrance that readers are a community, a community that loves the written word, and lives to pass it on.