How the Book Business Invented Modern Gift-Giving

It’s Christmas Eve, and you’re down to the last few names on your gift list. If you are combing the shelves at your local bookstore for gift ideas, you can take some solace in the fact that you’re participating in a commercial tradition that dates back nearly two hundred years. Books, it turns out, were not only among the first commercially produced Christmas gifts; the book business played a central role in turning Christmas into the commercialized holiday that we know today.
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