My only objection to the custom of giving books as Christmas presents is perhaps the selfish one that it encourages and keeps in the game a number of writers who would be far better employed if they abandoned the pen and took to work.

P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)

..." if they abandoned the pen and took to work". Pushing the pen is taking to work, kinda.

Why yes! And play writing was Andrew Lloyd Webber's hobby. And painting was Jean-Michel Basquiat's recreation. I concede that a minuscule minority will rise to their levels. But even so, if anyone has a grounded and steely determination to make a living, make an impact, and most importantly...make themselves happy through art and craft...let's by all means encourage them!

From : "Just what I "wanted
P.G.Wodehouse.

(In 1915, while war raged on the Western Front, P.G. Wodehouse offered this advice to the Christmas shopper. With the approach of another wartime Christmas)


......"Our friends greet us in the street with "Well! Christmas will soon be here!" registering the while a mental vow that, until they know what sort of a present we are going to give them, they are hanged if they are going to go above a dollar-ten for us. Everywhere you see it, this genial, Dickensy, hearty, peace-and-good-will-and-all-that-sort-of-thing spirit. Holly hangs on the walls. Happy days! Happy days! In these circumstances, it behooves us to be prepared. It is useless to imagine, as everyone has done in his more optimistic moods, that the family circle will accept regrets and stories of parcels gone wrong in the post.

You worked that, if you remember, in 1905, and it is not a thing that goes well twice. No, presents must be bought, and the only thing to do is to try to get off as lightly as possible.

The first rule in buying Christmas presents is to select something shiny.

If the object chosen is of leather, the leather must look as if it had just been well greased: if of silver, it must gleam with that light which, as the poet so well says, never was on sea or land. Books are very popular for that reason. There is probably nothing in existence which can look so shiny as a collected works of Longfellow, Tennyson or Wordsworth.

I have seen a common house-fly alight on the back of a Christmas edition of Rabindranath Tagore which I had given to my Uncle James and slide the whole length of the volume, eventually shooting off with incredible velocity and stunning itself against the wall. Many smart people, indeed, strew their drawing-rooms with books which have been wished on them in the merry season of Yule for no other reason than to encompass the dissolution of such flies as may have escaped the swatting of the lower servants told off for that purpose.

They may also be used as mirrors.

My only objection to the custom of giving books as Christmas presents is perhaps the selfish one that it encourages and keeps in the game a number of writers who would be far better employed if they abandoned the pen and took to work.

Publishers rely on the festive season to help them to get rid of all these bulky volumes which they have published at intervals during the past twelve months to oblige their wives' relations.

A more judicious spirit of giving on the part of the public would kill almost entirely the sale of such works as Travels Among the Lesser-Known Haunts of the Siberian Eel-Vulture, Forgotten Walks Through Old Hoboken, Bird-Life on the Lower Mississippi, and the like.

.......

http://wodehouse.ru/tt171201.htm

I feel like writing a book!

book are great but people today don't like a good book

Who knows where the cut-off point must be set: Shakespeare, Shaw, Wodehouse or somewhere else?

is this based upon poor choices given to him - perhaps he wanted cash instead