All Your Princeton Gift-Buying Dilemmas, Solved

Year in and year out, my strategy for gift-giving (holiday, birthday, or otherwise) can be boiled down to one word: scarves.  Whenever I'm traveling, I make sure to visit a local market and buy up a dozen or so pieces of the inexpensive local neckwear.  Come December, I pass them out like candy.You just can't go wrong:  foreign scarves are cheap, guaranteed to fit, appropriate for both guys and girls, and tinged with a perfect hint of exoticism / name-drop-y pretentiousness that's sure to thrill any Princetonian worth his salt ("Oh, do you like it?  A friend actually bought it for me on the streets of Zanzibar...).But this year I was forced to resort to other measures after discovering that my scarf stash had become misplaced somewhere between Phnom Penh and Wilmington, Delaware.  This year I was forced to buy my Hannukah presents in Princeton, New Jersey.Ugh, Princeton.  Adorably perfect town, to be sure -- but a little too perfect, don't you think?  A little too "tasteful".  In shopping terms, as you know, "tasteful" basically translates to "expensive", "handsome", and "old people-y."  As I made my way from cute little store to cute little store, I saw plenty of great gifts for my  grandma's upcoming birthday blowout (Happy 75th, MomMom!) and my great-aunt's Boca Raton housewarming soirée -- but very little in the way of options for my twentysomething friends.If I knew anything about music, of course, I would have just beelined for the Record Exchange.  Sadly, though, I possess, like, negative musical taste (#1 most played on iTunes?  This song.)  So instead I trundled sadly down Nassau Street, frustration mounting... until I discovered GlenEcho Books.Located across the street from Rocky-Mathey dining hall and down a flight of stairs, GlenEcho is less a "Used Book Store" than an "Old Book Store" -- the perfect place, as some random lady on Yelp notes, to buy "gorgeous, mid-century editions of classic literature" on a budget.  So if your friends have some favorite old-timey authors, go in and buy them a handsomely bound tome.  It'll really class up their dorm room, and maybe provide some reading pleasure besides.Even if you don't have any specific authors in mind, it's still worth paying a visit to the place.  First of all, the shop smells great -- faintly musty and dusty and wood-y, the distilled olfactory essence of Knowledge and Study and Time.  Second, there are tons of floor-level bins with the most fantastically random old volumes.  I picked up a whole set of collegiate writing textbooks from 1927 (total cost: $10) to give to my besties in the University Press Club.But the best part?  The best part is a whole collection of books at GlenEcho from the estate of one George F. Kennan (1904-2005).  You know -- anti-Soviet diplomat extraordinaire, Cold War architect of Containment, author of the Long Telegram, leading Classical Realist, longtime resident of Princeton.  Big deal kind of guy.How often do you get to shop the bookshelf of one of this country's greatest foreign policy thinkers?  Not often at all!  And this is a seriously impressive collection (at least for a politics nerd like me).  I ended up buying two of Kennan's volumes of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a classic history of a superpower gone to seed.  And these weren't just any old copies -- these were small leatherbound gems printed in London in 1827.  1827!  The find of my life.  And wait -- ask me how much each volume cost!  OK, OK, I'll tell you: $4.50.So next time you have to buy a gift -- for God's sake, go to GlenEcho.  Yes, an argument can be made that the store's wares are just as "tasteful" and pretentious as everything else in this town  -- but they're also totally awesome in a way that other Princeton offerings like, say, pashmina, never can be.  George Kennan!  Be still, my Woody-Woo toolish heart.