ny times birthday book review

This is the perfect birthday gift for that friend who just won't go digital

We all know that person who refuses to use a Kindle, still gets physical magazines, and learns about current events from a newspaper instead of Twitter. Whether it's your grandma, your dad or your friend who insists on only listening to vinyl, there's no way they're making an Amazon wishlist.

This birthday book from Uncommon Goods is the perfect gift for the luddite in your life. Starting with the day they were born, every page of the book is a New York Times front page from their birthday. The bound book is engraved in gold with the recipients name and birth date. As they look back at history through the lens of their birthday, this book is both extremely personal and universally appealing.

If for whatever reason they don't like the Times , the book is also available in Washington Post and Los Angeles Times versions. If the digital-phobic loved one is your significant other, there's an anniversary version, as well as baseball and football team histories for the sports-obsessed.

The Custom Birthday Book is available for $99.95. There's a 20-page minimum, but lets face it — no one born after 1996 knows what a newspaper is anyway.

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According to twitter, Emily Heller is a fake geek girl and a SJW. If you ask her friends, she laughs too loud and cries at cute animal videos. Prior to Mashable, Emily wrote for CollegeHumor and Reductress and most recently worked at a very bro-y tech startup. She lives in Brooklyn with three dudes, a cat who acts like a dog and a dog who acts like a houseplant.

Momfluential Media

The Original Influential

The Most Thoughtful Gift You’ll Ever Give – The NY Times of Your Life

April 5, 2016 by momfluential Leave a Comment

When I think of my father, it’s impossible not to think about the NY Times. He and his beloved paper are never far from each other. Sunday mornings of my childhood evoke the twin smells of coffee and fresh bagels and the sight of  him reading in bed. Even when he travels, he cannot do without the news.  Scoping out the nearest location to get his beloved paper in cities and remote villages around the world evolved into a family travel game for us. This is my dad – a reader and a writer who is rarely found without ink on his fingers.

Which is why I knew exactly who to get the book for, when the New York Times Store offered me the chance to review their Ultimate Birthday Book  – for a gifts for him story.

My dad is turning 88 this year. His personalized leatherbound book   includes the front page of the New york Times newspaper from every single year since he was born. It’s a treasure filled timeline of history. He described it as the “journal he always meant to keep, but never got around to”

In addition to the front pages are some sections on the significant news of each decade and personal pages. to record and preserve your own news, if you choose to add clippings and notes.

What makes it special, especially in my dad’s case, is how many memories each front page brings back. Just reading over the headlines and stories from each year brought back a flood of memories for my father. Reading them is like entering a time machine, transporting him to another frame of mind. He’s able to recall where, and who he was, with each year’s entry.

I suspected this gift would be a home run for my dad , who is not the easiest person to gift. I was right. When I gave it to him, we had to persuade him to put it down and come to dinner.

The book is shipped in a beautiful box and comes with a magnifying glass to read the news, a commemorative coin and a certificate of authenticity. It’s a perfect and thoughtful way to celebrate milestone birthdays and events and a delightful treat for the newshound in your life.

It’s probably the best gift I’ve ever found for my dad!

You can purchase this very special birthday gift at the New York Times Store . 

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New york times custom birthday book features every front page since your birth.

We’ve found the ultimate gift for the dedicated Times reader in your life—or a fun indulgence for a day you feel like treating yourself with something cool. The New York Times Custom Birthday Book is a beautifully bound hardback that culls every front page printed since the year of your birth, embossed with your name and birthdate for a super fascinating snapshot of world history over the course of your life.

The book rings in at just $100 and is printed in Williston, Vermont. However, as the seller notes, “it includes only pages from the year of the recipient’s birth onward. A younger recipient will result in a shorter book”—meaning it’s better suited for milestone birthdays if given as a gift.

The book is also available in an Anniversary Edition  (perfect for longtime lovebirds that have withstood the test of time) and can be printed with  L.A. Times  or  Washington Post stories if you or your giftee prefer these other periodicals.

You can order one over at Uncommon Goods .

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Birthday Newspaper Books

You are only a click away from creating a personalized birthday book for someone special. A gift to remember, opening the book you will be hit by the nostalgia of the past. Relive the news that hit the headlines on your birthday.

Personalized Washington Post Birthday Newspaper Book

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Our personalized newspaper birthday book is a thoughtful and meaningful gift that is sure to be treasured for years to come. It’s perfect for anyone who loves history, enjoys reading, or simply wants a unique and personalized keepsake to celebrate a milestone birthday.

With their name and birthday embossed on the cover and space to add pictures, notes, tickets, and messages once you receive the book, this is truly a one-of-a-kind gift.

If a recipient has a passion for history or journalism, our birthday books are wonderful presents that let you give something out of the ordinary. The book features a front-page reprint from the day of your recipient’s birth, and then every birthday thereafter. Let them retreat back into the past and discover the most popular headlines from when their life began.

Our Personalized Newspaper Books are thoughtful keepsakes recipients can treasure forever, especially since they can be personalized. You can add any name or date to the one-off leather or leatherette cover, as well as a special presentation message in the book’s opening page.

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Robert Louis Stevenson Loved Her. Many of His Friends Did Not.

In her engrossing book “A Wilder Shore,” Camille Peri tells the story of R.L.S. and his American wife, Fanny Van de Grift.

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By Brooke Allen

Brooke Allen has written about books for numerous publications, including The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion and The Hudson Review.

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A WILDER SHORE: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson , by Camille Peri

A hundred and thirty years after his death, just a few of Robert Louis Stevenson’s books are still widely read: “Treasure Island,” “Kidnapped,” “A Child’s Garden of Verses” and above all his 1886 novella “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a masterpiece of the grotesque that presaged the coming Freudian era and has exercised a remarkable impact on Anglo-American culture, with some 60 film and television adaptations to date. But Stevenson’s oeuvre was far more extensive. In his short life (he died at just 44, after a lifetime of debilitating illness) he produced a stunning array of novels, short stories, essays, poems and newspaper reportage. His “Complete Works” take up more than three feet on my bookshelf.

Discerning contemporaries saw him as a consummate artist. “He seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins,” wrote G.K. Chesterton enviously. Oscar Wilde deemed him a “delicate artist in language.” Henry James, who became a close friend, judged that his writing style “floats pearls and diamonds,” and after Stevenson’s death he wrote that he had “lighted up one whole side of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one’s imagination.”

Stevenson’s American wife, Fanny Van de Grift (1840-1914), was a powerful personality in her own right: an individualist who paid no mind to conventional gender roles, a brave and sometimes reckless adventurer who encouraged Stevenson’s penchant for a wandering life, and a domineering personality. Many in the all-male club of Stevenson’s writer friends considered Fanny a termagant, though there were a few, like James, who appreciated her character: “If you like the gulch and the canyon,” he wrote to Owen Wister, the western writer, “you will like her.”

Camille Peri, in her engrossing new dual biography of the Stevensons, “A Wilder Shore,” notes that previous Stevenson biographers have reflexively labeled Fanny as “difficult” without trying to understand how necessary she was to her delicate and high-strung husband, or the “passion, companionship and creative energy that became the life force of the Stevensons’ marriage.” While Fanny painted well and produced commendable short stories for the magazine market, she was modest about her own talents and conformed with the tacit marital arrangement: “Louis’s health came first, his work second and Fanny’s needs last.”

She herself was tough as rawhide. Hailing from Indianapolis, the state capital but still not much more than a frontier town, she had married an unreliable charmer at 17 and accompanied him to the silver mines of Nevada, where he failed to make a fortune and they shivered in a canvas and cardboard shanty. After a few years of tolerating her husband’s profligacy and infidelities, she made her escape, along with her children, studying art in Paris and then finding her way to the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, where she met Louis (as Peri refers to him), in France on his perennial pursuit of sunshine and health. Louis was enraptured with the battle-scarred, unsinkable American adventuress, a decade his senior.

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