Robin’s 2025 gift guide

Many morn­ings this season, I’d wake before 4 a.m., and a train would be blowing its horn through the dark valley. Kathryn and I would start our day, start our mill. This year, hearing me describe the work, my sister declared that I had found my way, at last, into a Richard Scarry scene.

I’ll con­fess again: I am merely bourgeois. I like buying and selling; I like making and mar­keting. I like ani­mals wearing pants, car­rying bread in the street. I think it’s just great — the dance of it all.

In recent years, the dance has stumbled: shocking arrest of pandemic, gelati­nous con­fu­sion of tariff. Yet the trains still run through the night, sounding the pulse of the world. Busy­town endures.

This year’s gift guide intro­duces a new category:

• Consumable gifts
• Durable goods
• Cosmic instruments ← new!
• Books

The stan­dard caveat: this guide is U.S.-centric, almost entirely parochial. Thank you, cosmopolitans, for your indulgence.

Consumable gifts

Fat Gold

My work life has two great lobes. One is writing and pub­lishing, and the other is Fat Gold, now rounding out its eighth year. We started the com­pany with a tiny leased olive grove; today, we make Cal­i­fornia extra virgin olive oil in small batches on a state-of-the-art mill that gleams like some­thing out of Star Trek.

I feel lucky to work on two dif­ferent things that are just so clearly and simply … good! With like, zero tradeoffs! Books: very good. Extra virgin olive oil: very, very good. The more you have of each, the better you are doing.

The Fat Gold Gift Set com­bines our flag­ship oils, which are both totally ver­sa­tile yet dif­ferent enough to make side-by-side com­par­ison inter­esting. Also: this year’s edi­tion of the 32-page gift zine was printed and bound by me. (There’s a rather stun­ning new centerfold … )

Boonville Barn Collective

The folks at Boonville Barn Col­lec­tive are fellow travelers, oper­a­tors of a small but ambi­tious food business, with offer­ings that can improve basi­cally every meal. Their Piment d’Ville is a pantry staple. Their Comapeño chile powder is rarified: they are the only pro­ducer of this variety in the U.S.!

It’s not all spicy. For those who don’t already know: most of the beans you find at the gro­cery store are wiz­ened stones; fresh beans are a whole other fruit. The Boonville crew rotates beans through their fields, and we are the beneficiaries. They offer a range of tasty varieties, and, as of this writing, all were har­vested about a month ago — a mere blip in bean-time. I just ate some fresh Tiger’s Eye beans this week, and they were ter­rific.

If you want to hit some­body with a thoughtful combo gift, put some Fat Gold together with a bag of zolfini beans, which are my favorite for a brothy bowl. Cook, ladle, glug with olive oil: easy and delicious.

Boonville Barn Col­lec­tive is doing things right — a farm so focused and sin­cere it seems implausible, here and now in the 21st century. Maybe it is implausible. Buy some beans and make it a little more plausible.

P.S. There’s also the sophisticated, seduc­tive Cali Mole bar, a col­lab­o­ra­tion with J Street Chocolate, another favorite.

Enzo's Table

I shipped some Clovis Crunch to a beloved friend on the mend, and she reported back that the gra­nola had dis­ap­peared in days, a notable hit among the avalanche of get-well sustenance. This is char­ac­ter­istic of Enzo’s Table. Their offer­ings don’t cover all the bases, but the bases they do cover, they cover per­fectly.

Whether it’s the actual best almond butter made in the San Joaquin Valley or a red wine vinegar sourced with bullseye pre­ci­sion from Italy, every­thing is pro­duced and/or chosen with speci­ficity and care. In that way, Enzo’s Table really rep­re­sents Cal­i­fornia at its best: nat­ural abundance … plus great taste.

I am lit­er­ally eating one of their biscotti as I’m typing this.

Daybreak Seaweed Co.

Daybreak’s Sea­weed Salt, pic­tured here in its native habitat, is a rad­ical gambit: improve? SALT?? Shockingly: yes. Nearly any­where a sprinkle of salt is needed, a sprinkle of Sea­weed Salt is even better. I don’t claim to fully under­stand the umami dynamics — I’m only reporting empir­ical evidence, gath­ered over the past five years.

I love a uni­versal condiment. I love a tiny jar. I love small, thoughtful com­pany: and that’s Daybreak.

Leaves and Flowers

In my household, many evenings — most — end with a Leaves and Flowers brew. While the com­pany has a broad roster of green and black teas, we are devoted to their herbal/botanical blends; Kathryn con­siders them very thought­fully sourced and assem­bled. If you have a clear vessel for brewing, it’s quite a show: com­plex and colorful, almost sculptural.

Their Sleep Tea is a sub­stan­tial upgrade from classic Sleepytime. Mt Tamalpais is delicious, with a subtle sweetness — a very light dessert. Any of these would make a great gift for a tea lover or the tea-curious.

Dandelion Chocolate

Don’t mess around. Get three bars, 70% (Pro) or 85% (Pro Max), put bows on ’em. Dan­de­lion is per­fect choco­late, per­fectly presented. The paper is luxurious, a low-tech time machine: fully evoca­tive of another era, when a bar of choco­late was some­thing superspe­cial.

Wait! It still is.

Durable goods

Clay and Steel

We begin this sec­tion with a rec­om­men­da­tion for the Bay Area folks:

I’ve written before about the class I took, ear­lier this year, at Clay and Steel in Richmond. I made a bronze bracelet which became a gift, so there are layers of pos­si­bility here: class as gift; product of class as gift; class AND product of class as gift … Clay and Steel offers gift cards, or you could just go ahead and pur­chase a slot. Sur­prise someone!

How­ever fun and sat­is­fying you imagine whacking hot metal might be: it is even more fun and sat­is­fying than that. Celeste Flores is a ter­rific teacher, and I truly cannot imagine a better envi­ron­ment for learning the basics. Clay and Steel classes have my highest rec­om­men­da­tion.

Roterfaden

You have to be careful with note­book systems, with any kind of “system” at all for thought and creativity, analog or dig­ital. The risk, always, is that the system over­whelms the thinking, becomes a sort of fetish.

But the Roter­faden Taschen­be­gleiter (“pocket companion”) isn’t really a system; it’s just a sturdy port­folio with clever clips that bind a col­lec­tion of note­books and other mate­rials con­ve­niently together. Those note­books can be swapped in and out, used for dif­ferent purposes — it’s up to you. The clips also accom­mo­date things like cal­endars, or these cool accordion-fold lists.

You can clip any note­book, made by any­body, into your pocket companion; it is the phys­ical equiv­a­lent of an open API. That said … the Roter­faden note­books are sort of dis­gust­ingly per­fect, bound with red thread.

Roter­faden is a small worker-owned coop­er­a­tive in (have you already guessed?) Germany. The Taschen­be­gleiter is a beau­tiful object, sat­is­fying to carry and manipulate, made in a sin­cere, sus­tain­able way.

JetPens

More note­books!! Technically, these belong in the first sec­tion — note­books are some of the best consumables — but I wanted to keep them close to the Roter­faden stuff above.

I really like this note­book, com­mis­sioned by the great Jet­Pens. The paper is the famous Tomoe River brand; the binding is inter­esting, diaphanous, a bit strange. You could bundle one of these with Roland Allen’s The Notebook … whoa now THAT’s an idea.

Here’s another good one with a nice shape. It also SMELLS great … ?

But take care, all ye who click over to the Jet­Pens web­site, for many have been known to click, who were never seen or heard from again … 

Silo

This was my most suc­cessful gift of the past year: a stacking storage system with a design so ele­gant it feels inevitable. Silo has the aura of a future classic.

Pic­tures don’t quite do this justice — click over to the web­site to see the pieces in action. The mar­keting goes heavy on desk views, but I think the system is per­fect in the kitchen, too. It comes beau­tifully packaged — buy it with the little insert and you’ll have a whole ceremony, opening it all up and stacking the pieces for the first time.

Silo is a co-production with the design studio CW&T, who have all sorts of strange and won­derful devices for sale. Uh oh … another note­book … 

Safran Everyday

Nearly all of Safran Everyday’s prod­ucts are made from laser-cut steel, bent into shape and powder-coated in per­fect colors. Just look at every­thing they do with this technique! I really admire the way they’ve elab­o­rated a con­sis­tent “grammar”, pushed it in so many dif­ferent directions. It makes me think of the way a poetic form restricts yet inspires.

I par­tic­u­larly like the double hook and the patio tray.

Safran Everyday is a per­sonal project that’s grown into a thriving business. There is a glimpse of the future here: a form of man­u­fac­turing that is light and local, cool to the touch.

Elrow Industries

The Miniphone Ultra case from Elrow Indus­tries trans­forms an Apple Watch into a tiny, pock­etable phone. Is this too weird?? It seems kinda great to me!

Thermoworks

I cook a lot of meat, and I am devoted to the meat thermometer; cooking without one feels like flying blind. But two of my ther­mome­ters broke in succession — one of them just … fell apart?! — leaving me with no way to PROBE.

This model from Thermoworks is the remedy, the real deal: a pro­fes­sional tool with sat­is­fying heft, a plea­sure to deploy.

Gardenheir

Who doesn’t need some superpremium British garden twine??

Every­thing about Gardenheir is over the top; rustic cosplay. Yet it’s all so beau­tiful! And some­times that’s exactly what a gift ought to be: over the top. Some­thing a person would never buy for themselves, but will feel so happy — so lucky — to receive. Just look at these watering cans!

Cosmic instruments

Yun Hai

I am SO excited about this one! The great Yun Hai Tai­wanese Pantry has designed a beau­tiful, riotous page-a-day lunisolar almanac for 2026. Of the genre, Lisa Cheng Smith writes:

This kind of almanac merges the Gre­go­rian and lunar cal­endars, Chi­nese astrology, agri­cul­tural timings, and folk beliefs into a book of sea­sonal cycles, daily rec­om­men­da­tions, and astro­log­ical predictions. There’s no one true form — hundreds of vari­a­tions exist.

I love this kind of printed product, dense with infor­ma­tion across many axes, from the prac­tical to the celestial. I’m very excited to receive my almanacs (I will not dis­close how many I pur­chased) and if you, too, find the form com­pelling, they are avail­able for pre­order now, with delivery in early December.

P.S. Don’t forget FOR A SECOND that Yun Hai also dis­trib­utes Yu Ding Xing Vat Bottom Soy Sauce, i.e., the best soy sauce.

Abrams Planetarium

Here is how the Sky Cal­endar works:

Every quarter, you receive a bundle of three monthly cal­endars. They are printed on paper of a pastel shade, and the design is qui­etly sublime. They come in the mail, in a reg­ular envelope. You stick them on your fridge. This costs $12. That’s it!

Perils of the gift guide: last year, the Abrams Plan­e­tarium received so many sub­scrip­tions so quickly, they assumed they were being spammed or scammed, and can­celed many as a result. So, if you tried to subscribe, but didn’t receive any cal­endars … try again! I’ve been in touch with the team and they under­stand your interest is real.

Universal Workshop

This year, Guy Ottewell has pro­duced his final Astro­nom­ical Cal­endar, which despite its name is not a stan­dard cal­endar but a hefty book. Guy’s illus­tra­tions are incred­ible in their clarity; somehow he makes spi­raling 4D motion totally leg­ible on the page. All of his books are great, but/and the Astro­nom­ical Cal­endar is a spe­cial piece of work, with 400 (!) of these illus­tra­tions. Grab this vale­dic­tory edi­tion.

I should add, Guy’s Albedo to Zodiac is an amazing entry in my favorite book genre, niche dictionaries: superfun to browse, rich with astronomy’s sig­na­ture mar­bling of math and myth. Any ama­teur astronomer would love this one.

Tidelog

If you spend any amount of your time around a body of water con­nected to an ocean, or if you aspire to do so, then the Tidelog is a required annual pur­chase. Turning the page on a new week becomes a lovely, useful ritual. For such a simple, superprac­tical tool, it’s sort of aston­ish­ingly beau­tiful; the Tidelog folks have found their way to a design that’s both classic and cosmic.

Hearts of Space

Hearts of Space is one of the great media projects: broadcasting continuously for more than fifty years (!), an ongoing explo­ration of an evolving genre. I’ve written before about the impact this show had on my youth; what’s amazing is that Hearts of Space isn’t just a memory! Most weekends, I visit the web­site and press play on the new episode.

A very afford­able membership gets you (or the ambient/electronic music fan in your life) access to a deep well of culture, not to men­tion a reli­able work sound­track when­ever needed.

(You can tell it’s old-growth media, with that three-letter domain name … )

Books

Mandy Aftel is a legend: perfumer, author, pro­pri­etor of the Archive of Curious Scents, an insti­tu­tion that feels like some­thing out of a novel, or maybe a Wes Anderson movie. She is, in short, the kind of person who makes the Bay Area inter­esting.

Now, Mandy is launching her new book in con­cert with San Francisco’s fab­u­lous Min­istry of Scent. Sym­bol­orum explores the tarot-adjacent “emblem books” of the 16th and 17th centuries: cat­a­logs of alle­gor­ical imagery; dreams on paper.

Min­istry of Scent is offering the book along­side a vir­tual launch event. For the lover of per­fumes and/or the seeker after signs and symbols — which might be you — this is a com­pelling combination, and a cool way to sup­port two Bay Area icons at once.

Butterflies of the Bay Area is gor­geous and delicate, as much about Liam O’Brien’s patient pencil as it is about the crea­tures he’s rendered. This book is a labor of love from Heyday, and the kind only they could produce.

Here is a per­fect gift for any­body who loves the Bay Area and its outdoors. Browsing these pages is med­i­ta­tive and grounding, a reminder that how­ever far human tech­nology pushes, it’s got nothing on the vio­lent mir­acle of the cater­pillar and the butterfly. Nothing!

The Wayfinder is THE novel of the season. This book is

1. huge, with incredible absorptive capacity; and
2. a real adventure, packed with genuine thrills; that
3. demonstrates historical sweep and crunchy detail to a degree that makes one wonder of the author, are you a sorcerer? With mastery over time and space?

It’s also a beau­tiful object, glit­tering and formidable. There’s a map inside. If you’re going to give a book as a gift, it ought to look and feel like this.

Ohno Type Co. is a dream, pos­sibly of the fever variety; glance at their offer­ings and you’ll under­stand. This small foundry has, for the past decade, exerted an out­sized influ­ence on global visual culture; it was Ohno that brought the glop.

I fol­lowed the Serious Guide to Irrev­erent Typography in its proto-form on Insta­gram and absolutely loved it — revelations in every letter. Now this sharp, opin­ion­ated mate­rial has come together in a proper book, one that will be a delight to any type lover.

Ensor­celled, the new novella from Eliot Peper, is a work of imag­i­na­tion and pre­ci­sion: my favorite of his books so far. Voice-y, evoca­tive, and suspenseful, it’s also short, and we LOVE a short book: a dream in one sit­ting.

You should pick up Ensor­celled because it’s a great story, a mini-bildungsroman with a through­line of game design, but you can also appre­ciate the meta level here, which is that Eliot is some­body really doing the damn thing: writing and pub­lishing at a very high level, under his own steam.

Is this too direct a gift for the person in your life who wants to pub­lish a book? I don’t know … I like the idea of, upon unwrapping, a mildly kinetic impact. Oof!

In any case, this is THE book for such a person (and maybe that person is you). Anne Trubek’s counsel is wise and prac­tical, deeply informed, never cynical. I love it when, for a cer­tain question — a cer­tain desire — there is simply a cor­rect prescription. This book pro­vides it.

The Making of Orig­inal Dun­geons & Dragons is a doorstop volume, devoted almost entirely to repro­duc­tions of early ver­sions of the game, from type­written drafts to pub­lished booklets. This isn’t just a breezy review, but a pre­sen­ta­tion of deep archival mate­rial. I pored over the book for hours, enjoying the edits in pencil, the 1970s paste-up design. I read out of order, flipped back and forth, skimmed and scanned, jotted notes on my phone.

This would make a great, weird sur­prise for a D&D fan, in part because the object itself whis­pers “arcane tome”. Notice that the pic­ture I’ve chosen takes pains to depict the four — FOUR — integrated ribbon bookmarks.

(I have it on good authority that inven­tory has dwindled, and all remaining copies are avail­able here, so! If this sounds inter­esting to you, I would snap it up.)

Looks like I’m building a nerdy little “making of” shelf:

I read The Making of Prince of Persia shortly after its ini­tial publication, and I have thought about it often in the years since. Jordan Mechner’s hyper­de­tailed memoir is sort of the ulti­mate tale of youthful dig­ital creation. There’s plenty of nos­talgia here, sure, but I want to insist that this book is — these feel­ings are — timeless.

Because it’s built from diaries and documents, Jordan’s story is sort of bru­tally honest; this is not a flat­tering recol­lec­tion, but a real chron­icle of the coalface. It’s bracing and inspiring — espe­cially, I sus­pect (or, I hope) for young readers, Jordan Mechners-to-be.

This is one for every­body who ever was, is, or will be a young person sit­ting in front of a blank screen and/or a blank page, dreaming of making some­thing new.

Adam Smyth’s focus in The Book-Makers is mate­riality and humanity. This is “a his­tory of the book with people put back in:”

not a techno-determinist account where abstract mechan­ical forces drive change, not a chronology of inventions, but a nar­ra­tive teeming with lives, and a his­tory that is full of con­tin­gen­cies and quirks, the suc­cesses and failures, the routes for­ward and the paths not taken, of these eigh­teen book-makers. People make books, and this is a his­tory of the ways they have done so.

Some­thing about printing seems to be magnetic, in the sense of inter­acting pow­er­fully with charged particles — charged intellects. What a roster Adam Smyth has assem­bled here. What electricity. This is a club you want to be part of. (Adam’s rol­licking pro­file of Ben­jamin Franklin is, on its own, worth the price of admission.)

The Book by Keith Houston exceeds all expectations. I think you only pick this one up if you already iden­tify as a book lover (or as a gift for someone who does), and there­fore you (they) already know a lot about books … yet The Book is still packed with sur­prises, ahas and oh-wows, rich with phys­ical detail. It is an X-ray of a pow­erful machine, and a chron­icle of the people who refined and reengi­neered it over the centuries.

Keith is also the author of the classic Shady Characters, not to men­tion the new Face with Tears of Joy—our great unfurler of the strange and won­derful sto­ries hiding inside the modern lexicon.

Here’s what I’d do. I’d buy some­body a big stack of books. Some would be chosen from the list above; others would be wild-foraged in a good bookstore. I’d wrap them all individually. I’d buy So Many Books, too — and ensure it was the last one opened.

This is (I will remind you) the cool new edi­tion with an intro­duc­tion written by me, plus a new set of illus­tra­tions. Gabriel Zaid’s book remains sharp and slim. I mean … it’s really very small! Don’t be sur­prised. My gifts would form a mighty ziggurat, with the D&D tome at its base, So Many Books at its peak.

But that’s just what I’d do.

That’s it for this year! Don’t forget, many of the items fea­tured in my pre­vious gift guides (2024, 2023) are still avail­able, still ter­rific.

Both of this edi­tion’s illus­tra­tions are drawn from the Index of Amer­ican Design, a Fed­eral Art Project of the New Deal era, which is very fun to browse.

Thanks for reading, and thanks, sin­cerely, for your enthu­si­astic sup­port this year! Have a great holiday. Listen for the trains.

From the dark valley,

Robin

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

November 2025