I gave one away last autumn and have been thinking about it since. Not because I regret it — I do, a little — but because the regret turned out to be about something more interesting than I expected.
Last October I gave a book to a friend who was going through a difficult stretch and who I thought needed it more than I did. This is the right reason to give a book. I knew it was the right reason at the time. I stood in front of the shelf for a moment, pulled it out, and handed it over the next day with the conviction that I was doing the correct thing.
By March I wanted it back. Not urgently — I had not, in the intervening months, been unable to sleep for want of it. But I had reached for it twice in the way you reach for something you know is there, and found the space on the shelf, and felt the specific small annoyance of a gap that used to be filled. I bought a second copy in April. A different edition — the cover is wrong, the page feel is wrong, the margins are wider than they should be. It is, in every meaningful sense, the same book, and it does not feel like the same book.
I have been trying to figure out why this bothers me more than it should.
What a book is before you give it
The copy I gave away had been on my shelf for six years. In that time I had read it twice and lent it to one other person — someone who returned it, which is how I still had it to give. In the margins of the first fifty pages, written in pencil in handwriting that embarrasses me slightly, are the notes I made the first time through. They are not good notes. They are the notes of a person still working out what to notice. But they are mine, in the particular way that the residue of attention becomes yours — the record of a reader encountering this specific book in this specific season of her reading life.
I did not think about the marginalia when I gave it away. I thought about whether my friend would find it useful, which she did. What I forgot to think about was that the book I was giving her was not just the text. It was the text plus six years of having been in my possession, plus two readings, plus the notes, plus whatever the book had become by being the book I reached for when I was in a particular mood. These things are not in the text. They live in the object. When you give the object away, they go too.
The new copy has none of this. The margins are clean. It has the faint smell of a recently opened paperback, which is pleasant but wrong — it should smell like my apartment, like the particular combination of old paper and radiator warmth that makes a book feel like it has been somewhere. The new copy has not been anywhere yet. It is waiting to become a book. The old one already was one.
What you are doing when you give a book
I think I used to believe that giving a book was primarily about the text — about transferring access to a particular set of words and ideas to someone you thought would benefit from them. This is how books are discussed in the recommendation context, and it is not wrong. The text is why you chose that book and not another one. But it is not, I think, the thing that makes book-giving feel different from recommending a book, or sending a link, or suggesting a title. You can do all of those things at no cost to yourself. Giving the physical book costs you something. The cost is specific: you lose the particular version of the book that existed in your possession.
What you are giving, when you give a book you love, is not just the text. You are giving a version of your own reading — the notes, the wear, the history of having been in your hands — along with an implicit claim about what the other person might find in it. The claim is not "this book is good," which you could communicate other ways. The claim is something closer to: I found something in this, and I think you might find something in it too, and here is the copy I found it in, which is the only evidence I have that the finding happened.
When you give a book you love, you are giving a version of your own reading along with a claim about what the other person might find in it.
This makes book-giving a more vulnerable act than I had thought. Recommending a book, you can be wrong and it costs nothing. Giving the book you already own — the specific copy with the specific history — you are offering something you actually have. If the other person doesn't connect with it, the loss is not just the book. The object that held your reading history is gone, and it went toward something that didn't land, and the gap on the shelf is now a reminder of the mismatch rather than a reminder of the generosity.
I don't think my friend didn't connect with it. She said she found it useful, and I believe her. But "useful" is not quite the same thing as what the book was to me, and the slight gap between those two readings — hers and mine — is, I suspect, part of what made me want the copy back. The book I gave her was mine. The book she read was hers. These were never quite the same book, and giving away the object made the difference visible in a way that keeping it would not have.
The wrong reasons to give a book
I have given books for bad reasons, and I want to be honest about what they were, because I think the bad reasons are common and not often named.
The first bad reason is performance. The book-gift as signal of how well you know the other person, or of how refined your taste is, or of how seriously you take the relationship. This version of book-giving is less about what the other person needs and more about what the giving says about you. The tell is that the book you choose in performance-mode tends to be the book you most want credit for knowing, which is usually not the book the other person would actually benefit from. I have done this. The recipients, to their credit, have been polite about it.
The second bad reason — and this one is subtler — is offloading. Giving a book because you have too many books and the shelf is full and this one hasn't been read in years and you might as well. This is decluttering with extra steps, and there is nothing wrong with it as decluttering, but it is not really giving in the meaningful sense. The recipient can tell, usually. The book arrives without the quality of attention that distinguishes a real book-gift from a castoff. Both are physically books. They feel different in the hand.
The third bad reason, which is the one I worry about most in my own practice, is the book-gift as a way of saying something you can't say directly. You are thinking about someone and you don't know how to tell them, so you give them a book that says it for you. This is not entirely wrong — books do say things we can't say, and sometimes the gift is the right medium for the thing. But it can also be a way of avoiding the directness that the situation actually requires, dressing up avoidance as generosity. I have done this too. I am less sure the recipients always understood what I was trying to say.
Why I keep buying second copies
The April copy of the book I gave away is not the only second copy on my shelf. There are, if I count honestly, four others — books I gave away at some point and later repurchased because I found I needed them again. None of the second copies feel quite right. They are the right words in the wrong body. The text is identical and the book is not the same.
I have decided that this is fine and probably unavoidable. The first copy of a book you love belongs to the season in which you read it. When you give it away, you give away that season's claim on the object, which you can't get back by buying another copy anyway. The second copy is the beginning of a new relationship with the same text — one that will, if you read it and keep it and let it sit on the shelf long enough, eventually become its own thing. The new copy will accumulate its own history. The margins will fill again, in different handwriting, about different things. The cover will wear in whatever way you handle books.
What I keep having to remind myself is that the book I am mourning no longer exists on any shelf. My friend has it, which is good. But the version of it that was mine — the one that had been in my apartment for six years and knew what it was to be there — is not in her possession either. It has been absorbed into her reading, which is a different thing from my reading, and the object will become something else over time in her hands.
This is what books do. They move, and they change when they move, and you cannot hold onto both the book and the reading at once. At some point you give one away, or it gets damaged, or the cover falls off and you replace it, and the object you had becomes a memory of the object. The words stay. The rest is a particular season you were in, and giving the book away is one of the ways you mark that the season has ended.
I still think I did the right thing in October. I also still think about the gap on the shelf sometimes, late at night, when I am looking at the new copy in the wrong edition with the wrong margins and the clean smell, which is slowly becoming the right smell. We are getting used to each other. I think it is going to be fine.