About a month ago I realized a good friend’s birthday was coming up and I wanted to get her a meaningful gift. What I mean by “meaningful” is something that is more personal in nature and preferably utterly useless.
The gift has two parts – a book and a glass bottle. The book is obviously the useful part but it also carries a nice story with it: I was walking down the streets of Tel-Aviv when I spotted a copy of Jerry Seinfeld’s book, SeinLanguage, in a used book store. My friend is a big Seinfeld fan so I thought this would be a nice candidate for a gift – I bought it even though I didn’t know whether I would end up giving the book to her.
When I got home I opened the book, which was in very good condition. It turned out to be a first edition from September 1993. It’s not worth anything, I’m sure, but if you buy a used book it’s nice when it happens to be a first edition. Inside its pages I found a bookmark. Here are pictures of both the book and the bookmark:
As you may have noticed, the bookmark is little yellow and seems old. It doesn’t have a web address on it, either. I was curious whether the “neighborhood bookstore” still existed and quickly found the Brookline Booksmith website. The website’s design and the personal nature of its content made me think the owner (Paul) might find the whereabouts of the book and bookmark amusing so I sent him a message detailing the story along with the pictures.
Soon enough I got this reply from Paul:
Ha!
Awesome. Thanks Amit. I was going to include the picture of the bookmark in this week’s newsletter, but then I looked at all the discounts that we haven’t been able to afford to offer our customers for many years now. Ahhh, the days when we could let our bestsellers go for 30% off….thank you so much for sharing this. I’ll pass it around among the staff, and it will go in next week’s newsletter.
Thanks,
Paul
And indeed a week later a mention of this appeared on the weekly newsletter.