This important book explores the many questions challenging librarians who work with gifts and exchanges (G&E) as part of their daily responsibilities. Too often, because of shrinking library budgets, library gifts are considered burdensome and unprofitable drains on both financial and personnel resources. However, Gifts and Exchanges: Problems, Frustrations, . . . and Triumphs gives you solutions that will allow you to embrace your library's gifts as rewards. In this book, you will discover the latest ways of disposing unwanted materials, planning and holding book sales and auctions, and operating a full-time bookstore with Friends of the Library. Gifts and Exchanges covers the many questions that are currently challenging librarians who work with gifts and exchanges--the problems, such as limited space and an understaffed team, frustrations, and triumphs that make up your daily routine in book donations. The many chapters in Gifts and Exchanges will assist you in solving your worst gift and exchange nightmares as you explore research and solutions on: the importance of a gift policy and its interpretation a template for drafting a gift policy G&E procedures in libraries not affiliated with the Association for Research Libraries answers to todays G&E problems disposing and profiting from unwanted gifts encouraging the gifts you want Gifts and Exchanges is a valuable reference that will help you swim through your department's sea of gifts and exchanges. As a library profesional, you will benefit from this book's current and well-researched answers to the problems that flood your G&E department.

This important book explores the many questions challenging librarians who work with gifts and exchanges (G&E) as part of their daily responsibilities. Too often, because of shrinking library budgets, library gifts are considered burdensome and unprofitable drains on both financial and personnel resources. However, Gifts and Exchanges: Problems, Frustrations, . . . and Triumphs gives you solutions that will allow you to embrace your library’s gifts as rewards. In this book, you will discover the latest ways of disposing unwanted materials, planning and holding book sales and auctions, and operating a full-time bookstore with Friends of the Library. Gifts and Exchanges covers the many questions that are currently challenging librarians who work with gifts and exchanges--the problems, such as limited space and an understaffed team, frustrations, and triumphs that make up your daily routine in book donations. The many chapters in Gifts and Exchanges will assist you in solving your worst gift and exchange nightmares as you explore research and solutions on: the importance of a gift policy and its interpretation a template for drafting a gift policy G&E procedures in libraries not affiliated with the Association for Research Libraries answers to todays G&E problems disposing and profiting from unwanted gifts encouraging the gifts you want Gifts and Exchanges is a valuable reference that will help you swim through your department’s sea of gifts and exchanges. As a library profesional, you will benefit from this book’s current and well-researched answers to the problems that flood your G&E department.

Examines gift exchanges as a foundational notion both in anthropology and in debates about international economic governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book analyzes why the most influential novelists of the long eighteenth century centered their narratives on the theory and practice of gift exchange. Throughout this period, fundamental shifts in economic theories regarding the sources of individual and national wealth along with transformations in the practices of personal and institutional charity profoundly altered cultural understandings of the gift's rationale, purpose, and function. Drawing on materials such as sermons, conduct books, works of political philosophy, and tracts on social reform, Zionkowski challenges the idea that capitalist discourse was the dominant influence on the development of prose fiction. Instead, by shifting attention to the gift system as it was imagined and enacted in the formative years of the novel, the volume offers an innovative understanding of how the economy of obligation shaped writers' portrayals of class and gender identity, property, and community. Through theoretically-informed readings of Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Cecilia and The Wanderer, and Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma, the book foregrounds the issues of donation, reciprocity, indebtedness, and gratitude as it investigates the conflicts between the market and moral economies and analyzes women's position at the center of these conflicts. As this study reveals, the exchanges that eighteenth-century fiction prescribed for women confirm the continuing power and importance of gift transactions in the midst of an increasingly commercial culture. The volume will be essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth-century novel, economic literary criticism, women and gender studies, and book history.

Gifts are always with us: we use them positively to display affection and show gratitude for favours; we suspect that others give and accept them as douceurs and bribes. The gift also performed these roles in early modern English culture: and assumed a more significant role because networks of informal support and patronage were central to social and political behaviour. Favours, and their proper acknowledgement, were preoccupations of the age of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Hobbes. As in modern society, giving and receiving was complex and full of the potential for social damage. 'Almost nothing', men of the Renaissance learned from that great classical guide to morality, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 'is more disgraceful than the fact that we do not know how either to give or receive benefits'. The Power of Gifts is about those gifts and benefits - what they were, and how they were offered and received in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It shows that the mode of giving, as well as what was given, was crucial to social bonding and political success. The volume moves from a general consideration of the nature of the gift to an exploration of the politics of giving. In the latter chapters some of the well-known rituals of English court life - the New Year ceremony, royal progresses, diplomatic missions - are viewed through the prism of gift-exchange. Gifts to monarchs or their ministers could focus attention on the donor, those from the crown could offer some assurance of favour. These fundamentals remained the same throughout the century and a half before the Civil War, but the attitude of individual monarchs altered specific behaviour. Elizabeth expected to be wooed with gifts and dispensed benefits largely for service rendered, James I modelled giving as the largesse of the Renaissance prince, Charles I's gift-exchanges focused on the art collecting of his coterie. And always in both politics and the law courts there was the danger that gifts would be corroded, morphing from acceptable behaviour into bribes and corruption. The Power of Gifts explores prescriptive literature, pamphlets, correspondence, legal cases and financial records, to illuminate social attitudes and behaviour through a rich series of examples and case-studies.

Explores the Safavid and Ottoman empires through the lens of gifts. When the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, built a state that championed Iranian identity and Twelver Shi'ism, it prompted the more established Ottoman Empire to align itself definitively with Sunni legalism. The political, religious, and military conflicts that arose have since been widely studied, but little attention has been paid to their diplomatic relationship. Sinem Arcak Casale here sets out to explore these two major Muslim empires through a surprising lens: gifts. Countless treasures—such as intricate carpets, gilded silver cups, and ivory-tusk knives—flowed from the Safavid to the Ottoman Empire throughout the sixteenth century. While only a handful now survive, records of these gifts exist in court chronicles, treasury records, poems, epistolary documents, ambassadorial reports, and travel narratives. Tracing this elaborate archive, Casale treats gifts as representative of the complicated Ottoman-Safavid coexistence, demonstrating how their rivalry was shaped as much by culture and aesthetics as it was by religious or military conflict. Gifts in the Age of Empire explores how gifts were no mere accessories to diplomacy but functioned as a mechanism of competitive interaction between these early modern Muslim courts.

Many otherwise enlightened people often dismiss etiquette as a trivial subject or—worse yet—as nothing but a disguise for moral hypocrisy or unjust social hierarchies. Such sentiments either mistakenly assume that most manners merely frame the “real issues” of any interpersonal exchange or are the ugly vestiges of outdated, unfair social arrangements. But in On Manners, Karen Stohr turns the tables on these easy prejudices, demonstrating that the scope of manners is much broader than most people realize and that manners lead directly to the roots of enduring ethical questions. Stohr suggests that though manners are mostly conventional, they are nevertheless authoritative insofar as they are a primary means by which we express moral attitudes and commitments and carry out important moral goals. Drawing primarily on Aristotle and Kant and with references to a wide range of cultural examples—from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm—the author ultimately concludes that good manners are essential to moral character.