Robin’s 2023 gift guide

Wel­come to my 2023 gift guide! This is my fifth year cir­cu­lating one. I love doing them, and I’ve received many reports that those of you reading this really do follow the links and buy the things I rec­om­mend, often in quan­ti­ties that are very mean­ingful for these small-to-medium-sized companies.

So: thank you! Keep it up.

If you’d like to skip my preamble, you can jump straight to each sec­tion: consumable gifts, durable goods, and books.

I’m Robin Sloan, a fiction writer with wide-ranging interests, which I capture here in my newsletter. This is an archived edition, originally transmitted in November 2023. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

For long­time sub­scribers, some rec­om­men­da­tions will be familiar, because I simply do not believe in rebooting the gift guide every year, the way many mag­a­zines and web­sites feel they must. When you’ve selected a great gift, seen it received with enthusiasm … why mess around?? Every year, for many years, a friend bought me the exact same Bundt cake from Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor. It was won­derful. You could be that friend.

But don’t worry: you’ll also find a sub­stan­tial serving of new recs below.

My rec­om­men­da­tions are, as ever, U.S.-centric. This is the the part of the world that I know, and this is the part of the world where I shop. Inter­na­tional readers: thanks for your forbearance.

One more thing before we begin! If you plan to ship any­thing this season (or any season), sign up for Pirate Ship, which allows you to pur­chase USPS and UPS postage online at rock-bottom rates, all through a simple, clear inter­face free from any cruft, with no sub­scrip­tion required.

I know that sounds like an adver­tise­ment but, in fact, I just think Pirate Ship is great. The cloying theme (ARRR!) is a small price to pay for such convenience.

If you print more than one ship­ping label a month (e.g., for online returns) then just buy this Rollo label printer. It will pay for itself, in terms of time saved and sanity pre­served, within two years.

Finally, remember that when you buy and print USPS postage through Pirate Ship, you can drop your parcel in the des­ig­nated area at any post office — no need to wait in line.

Onward!

Consumable gifts

This program brought to you by

We begin with the Fat Gold gift set. Our 24-page recipe zine was a huge hit last hol­iday season, so we went back to the Riso squad at Chute Studio in Oak­land to print a second edition, with some addi­tions and amend­ments new for this year.

The gift set com­bines a tin of our Stan­dard oil (bold and peppery) with a tin of our Blue oil (fragrant and fruity) and the 24-page zine, which also includes a concise, com­pelling intro­duc­tion to extra virgin olive oil.

Here’s a token of thanks for sub­scribing to this newsletter: use the dis­count code DRAGONMOON to get $10 off any order of $65 or more in the online shop. That code will be good until December 1.

Good olive oil is for everyone to use every day. As we’ve detailed in our Guide to Extra Virgin Olive Oil, this is the rare sub­stance that’s both deca­dently deli­cious and stu­pen­dously healthy. It feels like a glitch in the uni­verse; you should be pouring it on every­thing.

An annual sub­scrip­tion to Fat Gold pro­vides a com­pre­hen­sive olive oil education — and that sub­scrip­tion can be a gen­erous gift, or it can be an invest­ment in your own pantry. In the year ahead, we’ll send four dif­ferent oils, all pro­duced by your faithful cor­re­spon­dent (me) on our shiny new mill. The first batch will go out to annual sub­scribers in early December.

The cornucopia

It will be some hol­iday morning, sooner than you think. You’ll be sit­ting around drinking tea or sip­ping coffee. You’ll want a stick of biscotti … or three. Search your feelings — you know it to be true.

This is that biscotti: the best I’ve ever had, which is saying a lot, for I have sam­pled widely.

Enzo’s Table is a trea­sure of the San Joaquin Valley. Their almond butter is, like their biscotti, the best product of its kind. Their Fresno Chili Crush olive oil—made not by infusion, like most fla­vored oils, but by actu­ally throwing fresh chiles into the mill along with the olives—is per­haps the world’s most ver­sa­tile condiment. And I am newly obsessed with Enzo’s caramelized onion crackers.

You can fill up a very tasty vir­tual cart here, is what I’m saying.

The beans, beans, BEANS

Beans don’t take so long to cook because they’re beans; they take so long to cook because they’re OLD. Many years old, usually. Old and tough and hard.

Pri­mary Beans prints the har­vest date on their packaging, a total rarity among beanslingers. (I appre­ciate this because we do the same thing with Fat Gold, and it’s rare on the olive oil shelf, too.) Almost always, that har­vest date is the most recent avail­able for the bean in question. As a result, these beans don’t have to be pre-soaked; you can get straight to cooking, either on the stovetop or in an Instant Pot.

Pri­mary offers a whole range of inter­esting, sur­prising varieties. Here’s what I think. I think you ought to get their All the Beans set for someone and wrap all the pack­ages individually. The effect will be at first hilarious, and in due course deli­cious. This is the set I bought for my house­hold, a few months ago, and we are already about halfway through.

The pasta

Some­times it’s the smallest thing that can redeem, even transform, an experience. Fat Gold rarely does in-person sales events; ear­lier this year, we broke our rule, and the event was, commercially, a dud. However, about midway through, one of the other ven­dors came ambling over: Tony Adams, founder of Mill Valley Pasta Co., who wanted to say hello and offer us a few bags of pasta to try.

And now I have a new favorite pasta pro­ducer.

Tony’s pasta is air-dried, nice and slow, without any fans or blowers. I did not pre­vi­ously under­stand this to be a vari­able in pasta production, let alone an impor­tant one, but I can report to you that this pasta really does have some­thing spe­cial to offer, above and beyond the other pre­mium noo­dles avail­able in the Bay Area and elsewhere.

We ate our way through Tony’s offering, then ordered sev­eral bags to restock. My favorite so far has been the porcini radiatore, which are so savory and sat­is­fying they stand on their own, hardly any­thing else required, just a little garlic and olive oil.

The mafaldine shape is new to me; it comes in four stately clusters, and it would make for a fun dinner party.

I love Mill Valley Pasta Co.’s packaging, which reveals the inspi­ra­tion behind the name of each pasta shape — note the radi­a­tors pic­tured above.

The tiny jar

I’m a huge fan of Daybreak Sea­weed Co.’s offerings, and their newest addition presses all my buttons: ume … shiso … furikake! I just received a jar last week, and I can con­firm that this is one of those omni-seasonings that works on every­thing. Sprinkle it on toast. Sprinkle it on beans. Sprinkle it on steak? Not yet, but I’m going to try.

If ume! shiso! furikake! is too much for you, don’t over­look Daybreak’s core offering, their seaweed salt, which is, in nearly every sit­u­a­tion that calls for salt, a simple yet unde­ni­able upgrade. Roman sol­diers should have been paid in this.

The other tiny jar

“Robin sure does like tiny jars of fla­vorful sub­stances,” you might observe. Yes, he does. In fact, they might be his favorite thing.

Pic­tured above is Boonville Barn Col­lec­tive’s for­mi­dable take on Piment d’Espelette, dubbed “d’Ville” for Boonville, the cozy Cal­i­fornia town that is their home. In my house­hold, Piment d’Ville finds its way into every­thing. Spice up some eggs; swirl it into the salad dressing; knead it, along with salt and pepper, into ground lamb for burgers.

Boonville Barn Col­lec­tive’s Calabrian chile flakes are also a house­hold staple — they’ll make you realize the other chili flakes you’ve been consuming, at home or out on the town, are prob­ably many years old. These flakes, by contrast, are always fresh from the latest har­vest, and you can taste the difference.

A final advisory. Keep an eye out for the reap­pear­ance of the whole dried chiles—ancho, guajillo, cascabel, and more. I use these mainly to make Chili Colorado. The first time I did, the result was so good it brought tears to my eyes. What the heck, here’s the recipe!

The jam

My friends at INNA make the best jam in the country; they also pro­duce some of the cutest gift sets. Their combo of a jar of jam along with a jar of their house blend herbal tea — the only tea I drink anymore, it’s per­fect — is the ulti­mate offering of coziness.

Alternatively, you could do a lot worse than to score a jar of jalapeño jam, some local cheese, and some good crackers, and make that your offering at any/all hol­iday gath­er­ings this year.

You’d be in good company. INNA’s founder Dafna writes:

This whole INNA jam thing started one Thanks­giving years ago when I came across some­thing I’ve never seen before. Some friends were serving these amazing little appe­tizers — crackers topped with cream cheese and jalapeño jam. Well, I thought those little appe­tizers were just the best thing ever and pro­ceeded to eat so many of them that I couldn’t really eat the Thanks­giving meal that followed.

I thought to myself, “self, I’ve got to get some of that jalapeño jam,” and checked every store I could think of, but alas, no jalapeño jam to be found anywhere. I finally gave up on finding it at a local store, and decided to just make it myself from scratch. I devel­oped a recipe, made a batch of jam, kept a jar for myself and gave the rest away to friends and neighbors. Everyone who tasted the jalapeño jam got hooked, much like I did, and asked for more. Before I knew it, I was making batch after batch of jalapeño jam, and INNA was born.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you that INNA’s super spicy ginger snacks were named the world’s best snack for ginger FREAKS!

The chocolate

It is the pro­pri­etors of INNA who intro­duced me to J. Street Chocolate, which is out of this world, in the sense that it tastes like it comes from the future, and/or an alien planet. Julia Street is doing some­thing super spe­cial over there; I get a clear sense of new culi­nary ter­rain being charted.

Some of that ter­rain is made of white choco­late, with bits of toasted sesame and pre­served lemon embedded within. Maybe this for­mu­la­tion struck me so mem­o­rably because I don’t like (or: didn’t think I liked) white choco­late. It was one of those bites, rarer and rarer as you get older: “I’ve never tasted any­thing like this before … ”

All of J. Street’s inven­tions are worth a look. If you’re bored with all the usual fancy choco­late makers, here is your alternative. And, if you’re one of those ginger FREAKS, don’t miss the bar made with INNA’s own super spicy ginger!

The coffee

South of San Jose, in the vicinity of Gilroy, Cal­i­fornia, Patrick Martin of Proxy Coffee is qui­etly roasting the best coffee you can get for a hun­dred miles around.

One of Patrick’s roasts in par­tic­ular has become our house­hold staple: Omen, which he calls a “dark roast”, but which has nothing in common with the dark roasts you might know from coffee chains and truck stops. To me, it is more prop­erly a “per­fect roast”—almost the Pla­tonic coffee.

If you live in a house­hold in which coffee roast pref­er­ences are per­haps … not totally aligned … let me sug­gest that Omen might do the seem­ingly impossible, and pro­vide a common ground. (Pun not intended, but accepted.) Here is a bag of beans that somehow checks every box.

Durable goods

The calendar

I’ll begin the durable goods sec­tion with a semi-consumable: a calendar.

I’m a huge fan of the Seattle-based studio called ANEMONE. They offer an array of breathtakingly beau­tiful zines but/and their sim­plest offering might be my favorite: the Long Calendar, showing three months at a time, a tall stretch rather than a squat rectangle.

You know I appre­ciate things that frame time dif­ferently, more deeply. It might be fun and inter­esting to start the year ahead with a new perspective.

The pants

I’ve pur­chased a lot of items from NYC-based Outlier over the years, and have returned approx­i­mately half of them because it turned out they were too cool for me. Or, alternatively: I was not cool enough for them.

The items I’ve kept, I’ve loved, and among those is the Ramiefall Yes pant. I wear these as around-the-house pants and even pajamas, but you could cer­tainly wear them out into the world. The fabric is light, with a nice tooth; sort of like a grit­tier linen. “Ramiefall”? It’s appar­ently spun from the fibers of a plant in the nettle family. Just like J. Street Chocolate, many of Outlier’s tex­tiles feel like imports from another time­line and/or planet, and Ramiefall is no exception.

It’s a wildly impres­sive company, inde­pen­dent and path­breaking, even if approx­i­mately half of their stuff is too cool for me.

The sweatshirt

Here it is! Here is the best sweatshirt: Merz b. Schwanen’s original, made from fabric pro­duced on a loopwheeler, which is a machine that weaves a con­tin­uous tube, rather than a flat sheet — so, when you fashion that tube into (for example) the torso of a sweatshirt, there are no side seams. (Loopwheeled fab­rics are also great for socks.)

Here’s a view of the machines. They are old-fashioned and rare, only oper­ated today in Japan and Germany. There’s a bit of a “last days of metal type” vibe here:

I own plenty of sweat­shirts, pur­chased from many dif­ferent brands, most of them not pro­duced on loopwheelers. Most of these sweat­shirts are per­fectly fine.

Merz b. Schwanen’s sweat­shirts, how­ever, are beyond fine. They are remarkable, with a fit and finish that evokes formalwear, in the sense that wearing them makes me stand a little straighter.

I should note that, like many 100% cotton gar­ments of this kind, shrinkage is a real concern. The Merz b. Schwanen sweat­shirts I own fit per­fectly — PERFECTLY — so I do not put them in the dryer, instead let­ting them air dry.

(While the Merz b. Schwanen T-shirt is also excellent, it is not, in fact, the best T-shirt. The best T-shirt is the John, from Tenue de Nîmes of Amsterdam.)

The clothespin

If you’re going to air-dry your fancy German sweat­shirts, these are the clothes­pins to use! Kevin’s Quality Clothespins: the Fer­rari of clothes­pins. The Mac­Book Pro of clothes­pins.

I know it sounds like a joke, but they really are terrific, carved with little fea­tures that feel good in the hand, make you smile. Life is too short, and your home too small, not to fill it with things that make you smile.

The bike bell

Here’s another pow­erful smile-maker. In all my years can­vassing streets and sidewalks, all around the world, I’ve never heard a better bicycle bell than Spurcycle’s. This is the one; this is the tone; this is the reason to ride.

I’ve had one of these bells mounted on my bike for sev­eral years, and I ring it at every opportunity. I ring it when I’m coming up behind a pedestrian; I ring it when I’m approaching an intersec­tion; I ring it hello and I ring it goodbye. The tone is pure and resonant; it holds and carries — here is a bike bell that rings, rather than going tink or cronk. All this, without being annoying: if you are both­ered by the clean, clear sound of this par­tic­ular bell, you have deeper prob­lems than the cyclist on your left.

At this point, it is almost more accu­rate to say I have a bicycle for my bell, rather than a bell for my bicycle.

The wallet

Last year, I rec­om­mended Tsuchiya Kaban’s leather goods, like this bag that I con­tinue to carry ecstatically. Last year, I acknowl­edged that they are really very expensive. But … I don’t know. Think about how you spend your money over the course of a year; think about how it trickles out in a dozen ways. My bag makes me happy every time I touch it; isn’t there some pow­erful amor­ti­za­tion at work there?

If you or your gift recip­ient already have a beloved bag, con­sider this nice capa­cious wallet. I keep just one credit card in my everyday wallet, attached to my phone; all the rest are stored in this wallet, which I keep inside my bag. It feels won­derful in the hand, and I always appre­ciate the little cer­e­mony of unwinding the loop to access what’s inside, winding it again when I’m done.

The candle holder

Jinen is a smorgasbord, packed with treats at every price level. I’ve pur­chased many of their selec­tions over the years, but/and this is one that has leapt beyond “oh, that’s nice” into the realm of trea­sure:

The Nousaku brass candle holder comes with sev­eral brass spikes, small but very pleas­antly weighty. The idea is to stick one or sev­eral of these spikes into your candle at var­ious points along its length. When the candle burns past those points, the spikes fall, striking the bell-shaped holder with a tone that is almost unbe­liev­ably clear and calm, and somehow always a surprise.

I should add, the candle holder doesn’t only ring when the spikes fall; it rings, softly, basi­cally when­ever and how­ever you touch it. It is so well-formed that it seems to bubble with song. What a won­derful thing to have in your home.

A theme emerges: paying extra for things that will make you happy over and over again; paying extra for a bright clear tone. I’ll ener­get­i­cally defend both of these principles.

The synthesizer

Pluto is an all-in-one synthesizer, com­plete with sound sources, a sequencer, and cool effects. Its creator, Justin Van Slembrouck, doc­u­mented Pluto’s design and engi­neering on Insta­gram as he progressed; it was fas­ci­nating to watch, and then mag­ical to receive the fin­ished product. Because it’s so com­pact and com­plete, I’ve found it fun to tinker with the instru­ment over coffee in the morning. You sit and sip, twirl and fiddle, make a sound no one in the uni­verse has ever heard before, then start your day. Pluto is pricy, as befits a piece of artisan elec­tronics made in the U.S., but/and for the right person (which might be you) it will pro­vide years of exploration.

The print

Amy Burek of Awkward Ladies Club is a Riso­graph wizard. Her online shop is packed with delights, but/and the veg­etable prints, in par­tic­ular, are among the best Riso­graph work I’ve ever seen. There are two other prints listed in Amy’s shop along­side the green cab­bage pic­tured above — they’d make a won­derful set.

Not to be missed, the zine titled My Favorite Microbes would be a delightful stocking stuffer for the right person.

Books

I’ll begin with a couple of online book­stores so rich and inter­esting they’re worth browsing in their entirety. These are both small operations, curated and opinionated — the soul of pub­lishing and bookselling.

• 50 Watts Books, the empo­rium of Will Schofield, a well­spring of the weird and won­derful. Start with the arresting illus­tra­tions of Botaniphoria by Asuka Hishiki, or per­haps Toshi Omigari’s Arcade Game Typography, the per­fect gift for someone who loves video games and their history. Every child must read and become mildly dis­turbed by The Rainbow Goblins.

• Belt Publishing, the great inde­pen­dent voice of the Rust Belt. I grew up in the sub­urbs of Detroit, and I’m gifting Detroit in 50 Maps to a few friends this year. If you live in the Rust Belt, they might pub­lish an anthology about your town! Anyone, anywhere, can cer­tainly appre­ciate a great pie cookbook.

Now, a few spe­cific rec­om­men­da­tions.

So Many Books, by Gabriel Zaid, is the book of books: explaining and reframing the reality of this mass, this flood, this (sometimes) compulsion. Its size reads almost as a joke: the book about vast­ness is palm-sized, mer­ci­fully short and punchy. It belongs in every library, like the bay leaf in every pot.

P.S. If you don’t buy this directly from Paul Dry Books, you are a monster.

The Walking Man, by Jiro Taniguchi, pub­lished in Eng­lish by Ponent Mon, is one of my favorite graphic novels of all time. It is mostly wordless, and also basi­cally plotless, simply chron­i­cling a moon-faced fellow’s long walks through the Japanese landscape. The art is crisp and detailed; the time cap­tured here, hap­pily adrift in the flux of urban life, with a tree and/or stream never far from sight, feels basi­cally per­fect. A great gift for the comic reader and/or ener­getic walker in your life.

Things Become Other Things is the new book from real-life Walking Man Craig Mod, who roams the back­roads of Japan, cap­turing lumi­nous images with his camera and his mind. His pre­vious book, Kissa by Kissa, is per­haps an easier sell — it’s about cute cafés! — but/and TBOT is the full expres­sion of a writer and pub­lisher at the top of his game. Printed and hand bound in Japan, this is a truly beau­tiful object.

I’ll now rec­om­mend the sequence of Hild, pub­lished in 2013, and Menewood, just out, both by Nicola Griffith. Set in seventh-century Britain, these are the Ulti­mate Winter Books: rich, absorbing, brim­ming over with sen­sory detail. Time passes in these stories, great swaths of it; Nicola revels in the seasons. It’s all just per­fect, the work of a true master. Get these books for the big-time reader in your life. Wrapped up together, the parcel will be so weighty your recip­ient will sus­pect you’ve given them a kettlebell.

Here’s a book that uses its very spe­cific sub­ject as a lever to crack open the megascale, the universal, even the sublime; in other words, here’s my favorite kind of book. Dust, by Jay Owens, is a glo­be­trot­ting odyssey that touches science, nature, and geopol­i­tics. It grew out of Jay’s path­breaking email newsletter, and so I believe one reason to read this book, among many, might be the provo­ca­tion it sug­gests: what kind of project might YOU begin, that could con­ceiv­ably take you to places this wild, and result in a piece of work this for­mi­dable? Never hurts to ask. Jay will show you the way.

Dilla Time by Dan Charnas is a biog­raphy both per­sonal and cultural, tracing the life and influ­ence of an artist whose sound changed every­thing, even if he was never, in his lifetime, a house­hold name; even if he isn’t today. It’s a book about music and technology, about the way global cul­ture works. It’s also about Detroit, and the Detroiter named James DeWitt Yancey, who became J Dilla. If you know a hip hop fan, buy them this book and enjoy the view as their eyes bulge, betraying their dis­be­lief that YOU under­stood enough to get THIS for THEM.

I love shopping! I do. I love com­merce — the dance of it, the etiquette. I love it as buyer and seller both. I love con­sidering alternatives, and I love being con­sidered. I love set­tling on favorites. I love stum­bling across surprises.

Am I simply bourgeois? Yes, and I’ll wave that flag proudly. This is a big part of my pol­i­tics: which is not a pol­i­tics of “free markets” or “free trade”, but rather of sys­tems that can sup­port com­merce and craft at every level, espe­cially the smallest and most careful.

We are a long way from such sys­tems, in the present con­fig­u­ra­tion of our world. It’s too dif­fi­cult to make things at a scale that’s sat­is­fying and sus­tain­able for everyone involved. Even so: rich veins of excel­lence endure, and I hope I’ve traced a few in this guide.

Not too long ago, the shiny new James Webb Space Tele­scope and the tough old Hubble Space Tele­scope worked together to pro­duce this image, com­bining vis­ible light (Hubble) with infrared (JWST) to render a sharper image than ever before of a little patch of sky:

How little a patch? About one-sixtieth the width of the moon. Look at it, full of galaxies. Galaxies! Each one full of stars. Some­where out there, they’ve got bike bells and candle holders, or the equivalent. It is a certainty.

Sci­ence fic­tion at its wildest doesn’t do this justice. The dazzle of the uni­verse seen clearly; the dizzying enor­mity of it. I believe that the great chal­lenge of the next hun­dred years and more, for pol­i­tics and cul­ture and every­thing else, is to digest this reality.

I think we can do it.

In the meantime, there’s life to be lived, and tiny jars of fla­vorful sub­stances to be gifted. There’s no incom­pata­bility there. A jar of jalapeño jam waits on the table; the galaxies wheel above. It’s all real.

I love being alive on this planet, in this uni­verse. Look at that picture! Thanks for being here with me.

From Fresno,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in early-ish December.

November 2023