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[03/29/00]

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"Our customers love learning -- and the written word," say founders Steve and Lori Leveen in their introduction to the holiday catalog. That congratulatory message (on the order of "you are a reader, you special smart person, you") explains a kind of tchotchke that has existed for years and currently makes its home in the Levenger catalog and in bookstore gift departments. In an age when our media is constantly saturated with dire reports on how the average American watches four hours of television daily or on how pornographers might show your children dirty pictures on the Internet, the market for paraphernalia that identify their owner as literate and interested in books appears to be slowly and steadily expanding.

Items like Levenger's paddle-ball game and coin purse cater to nostalgia for the days when pleasures were simple and products were made with care. Since buying them wouldn't identify me as a "serious reader" to anyone but myself, presumably I purchase this kind of thing from Levenger rather than from Restoration Hardware or the Sundance catalog because I like the idea of myself as Reader more than the idea of myself as Ms. Fix-it or New Age Woman Sensitive to Native American Culture. Items like the chess set or the calendar of globes, however, offer the purchaser an opportunity to publicly demonstrate interest in the enjoyments of the intelligentsia. There are lots of these available from Levenger: wordsmith games, cases for special pens, collectible editions of books by Charles Dickens or Lewis Carroll.

More practical products make up maybe 20 percent of the catalog. The "serious desk for the bed" and the pillow "designed for reading, not sleeping" appeal to someone who not only reads "seriously" but thinks of himself as doing so. In a similar vein, there are several boxes that organize multiple colors of Post-it notes, CDs of classical and instrumental music "for the reader" and a lamp that allows the owner to read in bed without disturbing her spouse.

Perhaps the growth of chain bookstores as public spaces has gotten people interested in the idea of being a reader -- at least, a reader as imagined and promoted by the corporate wizards of places like Barnes & Noble. At my local B&N, the reading tchotchke shelves have an entire area unto themselves. As reading becomes linked to a particular kind of social activity (browsing, flirting, coffee drinking), and places to do it can be found in any local mall, "a reader" is becoming something that it wasn't before: a person affiliated with the products of a large commercial enterprise. That person needs to be encouraged to become a regular customer, and one way to do that is to provide him with self-congratulatory items like bookmarks, special pillows and itty-bitty bookmarks that celebrate his identification with the company's merchandise.

Like the products in the Levenger catalog, most of the things for sale at B&N give their owners a self-image as a reader that is apparently inadequately supported by ownership of actual books. The big-ticket items are bookends, ranging in price from $29.95 to $69.95, and they are displayed holding up the sort of tomes that almost no one but a graduate student owns for any purpose but a middlebrow display of cultivation: Everyman library editions of Anton Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, Daniel Defoe. They have been relieved of their shiny white jackets so the volumes look older, more official.

The bookends themselves feature a pint-size bust of Shakespeare or a "studious gargoyle." "This inquisitive medieval gargoyle is catching up on his reading as he protects your library from demons, bêtes noires, etc.," says the promotional copy. The "literary cat" has miniature bookshelves topped by a curious feline and the "world scholar" ends feature a ceramic stack of "well-read" books and a sepia-colored globe: "We consider this a perfect gift for the worldly reader."

Clearly, the consumer targeted by these reading tchotchkes is not actually a world scholar. It's safe to say that members of the intelligentsia will by and large turn up their noses at minibusts of Shakespeare. The tchotchke makers seem to be selling a fantasy of readerliness to people who either strive for the cachet of intellectualism or feel nostalgic for the good old days of the 19th century, when country houses had libraries and novels came in three volumes.

Next page | Enough with the Shakespeare -- why can't I have a Cynthia Heimel paperweight?