A gift guide
Gift ideas for history lovers
The history lover in your life probably has the books already. The best gifts give them a way into the past they haven’t had yet: the original words, the places themselves, and the papers people read at the time.
The original words
Nothing brings a period closer than the people who lived it. A good edition of a first-hand account makes a gift that gets read rather than shelved:
- Ernest Shackleton’s South (1919), his own account of the Endurance expedition.
- Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922), on Scott’s last expedition, by one of the men who went.
- The diary of Samuel Pepys: the Great Plague, the Great Fire and a great deal of gossip, written as it happened.
History that keeps arriving
The Packet follows Shackleton’s Endurance expedition in twelve monthly dispatches, in his own words, with a chart that grows panel by panel. Everyone sets out together: the first dispatch arrives in January 2027. The wreck of the Endurance was found in March 2022, 3,008 metres down in the Weddell Sea, and this is the story of how it got there. Subscriptions open in November, so it can be a Christmas present.
Gaslight is the news of this month exactly 150 years ago, set again as a Victorian newspaper: the reports, the crimes, the shipping and the advertisements, with a leaflet on what was really going on. The first issue, November 1876, is planned for November 2026.
For someone who loves natural history, Nature Printed posts two rare species a month, as the old naturalists drew them. It’s open now.
Books that bring a period to life
- Alfred Lansing’s Endurance (1959), still the gripping way into the Shackleton story.
- Judith Flanders’s The Victorian City, on everyday life in Dickens’s London.
- Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a real Victorian murder and the detective who tried to solve it.
Somewhere to go
A year’s membership of the National Trust, English Heritage, Historic Environment Scotland or Cadw in Wales gives them a year of days out, and free entry to hundreds of houses, castles and abbeys. For a summer treat, tickets to a history festival, such as the Chalke History Festival in Wiltshire each June.
For the family historian
- A subscription to the British Newspaper Archive, to search old local papers for ancestors’ names.
- A reprint of an old Ordnance Survey map of the town or village their family came from.
- A newspaper from the day they were born, or from the day their grandparents married.
Small gifts and stocking fillers
- A used Penny Black from a stamp dealer: the world’s first postage stamp, first used on 6 May 1840.
- A reprinted old map, or a print of an old engraving of their town.
- A notebook and a fountain pen, for someone who still writes letters.
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