QUINTON

Christmas · For book lovers

Christmas gifts for book lovers

The reader in your life owns the books. That is the whole problem with buying for one. So: 65 lines from Wilde, Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare, Dickinson and Marcus Aurelius, printed plainly on things they will use — mugs, totes, shirts and hoodies — and sorted here by what you were planning to spend.

All printed to order in the UK, posted tracked and free. Leave a decent margin in December; nothing is sitting in a warehouse waiting.

Lines that are actually about Christmas

Dickens wrote most of them. A Christmas Carol came out in 1843 and he died in 1870, so the whole thing is out of copyright — which is why half of Christmas sounds like him. Clement Clarke Moore did the night before, Walter Scott did the fire, and Alcott opened Little Women with the only honest sentence about presents anybody has written.

Secret Santa, under £25

Where most office limits land. One thing, no sizes to guess at.

The proper present, £25 to £45

A shirt or a tote — worth wrapping, and it gets used all year.

The good one, over £45

For the reader you actually like — the heavier things, and the ones that last longest.

Bookish stocking fillers

Every one of these goes on the £16 mug. It is the safest thing on the page — no size, no taste in clothes to second-guess, and it is in their hand every morning rather than in a drawer by February.

If you know what they read

Pick the writer first. The book lover shelf is laid out by author for exactly that — Wilde and Marcus Aurelius are not the same present, and getting that right counts for more than which garment it lands on.