Charitable Gift Giving

Since our last post about the great organization GoneReading International, they’ve added a whole new set of products for book lovers.

When we last posted about them, they had mostly T-Shirts and mugs. But since then they’ve added a whole bunch of other great gifts that are perfect for the reader (or the person you’re encouraging to be a reader) in your life.

Know someone who’s fanatical about the Twilight Series, the Vampire Diaries, or one of those other popular vampire books which I just don’t get? 🙂 This bookmark is perfect for them, especially if they happen to have an older sibling or friends who are always arguing with them about how Harry Potter is better.

By the way, in the interest of equal time, there’s also a My Wizard can Beat Up Your Vampire version.

Looking to decorate a reading room or library in your house? Their fine art prints are the perfect decoration. Here’s a print of Van Gogh’s “Oleander and Books”.

Not to be confused with Ollivander, the guy who runs the wand shop (and no, I’m not sure why I’m obsessed with Harry Potter today).

Do you know a REAL bookworm? Here’s the ultimate game for them. It was a Dark and Stormy Night is a board game where each player picks a card and reads the first line of a book, and the other player needs to say what book it is. It’s not exactly a game for everyone–but those for whom it is for will LOVE it.

By the way, the writer of “It was a Dark and Stormy Night” was 19th century Victorian author Edward Bulwer-Lytton who used it for his 1830 novel Paul Clifford (who, incidentally, also coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword”. So if your answer was “Snoopy”, you’re about a later albeit granted a more memorable version (suddenly, a shot rang out! the maid screamed!)

There are too many great new gifts to list here, but I can’t stop without listing out my absolute favorite. GoneReading has a new set of metal bookmarks with oh-so-cute charms on them. I got a chance to take a look at one bookmark charm featuring a donut with sprinkles and another featuring an oh-so-cute little hot dog.

Next time you have to buy a present for someone, why not buy a copy of a great book, and include one of these incredibly cute bookmarks? They’re not expensive, but they’ll be gifts they treasure for a long, long time.

It’s wonderful to see Brad and the team at GoneReading continue to build their online store to have such creative gifts for readers. And their cause is a vital one.

A few weeks ago, I got a chance to visit the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit in New York’s Times Square. There was something about it that was just amazing. There were fragments parchment from 2000 years ago. Each one contained meticulously written hand-written words.

The people who lived back then knew what a literal treasure the written word was. While today we have copiers that churn out hundreds of pages a second, then for a scribe to copy an entire book took years of laborious work. Even as they saw their own civilization threatened with extinction, they hid their writings in jars and regarded them above any other early possession they had. Because from age to age, the way to destroy a movement or a people was to destroy their books.

Today, like so many of the other luxuries this society takes for granted, we take writing for granted. A lot of us probably haven’t stepped into a public library for years. Whatever writing we consume is off the Web, usually in bite-sized pieces. Our attention spans last about one or two paragraphs before we click off to the next Web site. Our lives become so busy that we hardly have time to watch 30 minutes of TV anymore, much less curl up with a good book.

And yet if you look at all the great minds who have changed the history of the world for the better, they all have one thing in common. They read. They read all kinds of books, from all kinds of people, from all periods of history. They read things they agree with and things they don’t agree with. They challenge their deep-seated ideas and concepts. They learn about new worlds and new ways of thinking.

I often like to say we live in a world where everyone is so busy making a living they forget how to live. In the same way, we live in a world where there are so many words that people forget how to read.

And worse, believe it or not there are still areas of the world that live not too differently than they did 2000 years ago. In many areas of the world literacy is low or non-existent. This fuels the cycle of poverty.

Gone Reading International has an amazing mission where they donate 100% of the after-tax profits of all their gifts for book lovers to fund great non-profits around the world like READ Global and Ethiopia reads, as well as raising money for public libraries here in the United States, at a time when they need help more than ever.

Be sure to visit their Web site and pick up some great gifts. The bookworm in your life will love it!