Books make wonderful gifts during the holidays and throughout the year, but it is impossible to find any one book that will appeal to everyone. Each book’s appeal ultimately is as singular as the person who receives and reads it—there is no one size fits all in the world of letters.

Copies of 4,109 issues of The New Yorker— every one since the magazine’s inception in the 1920s—would be a swell gift for anyone who likes to read, but who aside from the Collier Brothers would actually want to have them around the house? And even if you had room for them, you’d go nuts trying to find anything in particular, from their first profile of rising young actress Bette Davis to the cartoons of James Thurber to the first appearance of film reviewer Pauline Kael.