Opening a Door

I give gifts to two kinds of people--those who think books are a ho-hum present, and those who understand that a book is a gift in the same way a blood transfusion is.

Let’s talk about the latter.

Earlier this year, my friend Maureen told me about a writer she had loved as a child, named Marguerite de Angeli. New to me, de Angeli grew up in Philadelphia, where Maureen and I grew up. Indeed, the writer went to Girls High School in Philly, an elite public school where my aunt was a guidance counselor. De Angeli died 10 years ago, aged 98, in Chestnut Hill Hospital, a mile or two from where Maureen and I went to college.

Maureen, who does not suffer mediocrity gladly, rhapsodized about de Angeli’s sensitive and pioneering books about race and ethnicity and her intimacy with the Philadelphia of our shared childhood.

My friend thought my niece Hannah, just learning to read, would love de Angeli’s “Thee, Hannah,” a picture book about a little Quaker girl whose sometimes nettlesome religion leads her to play a role in the Underground Railroad. The book would not only give my niece a chance to read about a young heroine who shares her name, but also would introduce her to a writer who believed, as de Angeli wrote in her 1950 Newbery Medal-winning book, “A Door in the Wall,” that reading is dependable magic. As she writes, the mind can go where the legs may not be able to follow: “Reading is another door in the wall.”

According to the Internet, the world’s most efficient used book store, “Thee, Hannah,” is out there, waiting to be had.

And Maureen will get a treat too. As a child, she treasured a de Angeli book, “Petite Suzanne,” about a little Acadian girl. She kept it well into adulthood, until a thoughtless relative gave it away and it was read to ruin. A woman who believes that books are better than estrogen, more powerful than Prozac, Maureen will find it today under her tree, along with de Angeli’s hard-to-find 1971 autobiography, “Butter at the Old Price.”

Friendship, too, is a door in the wall.