Easy Way to Make a Bottle of Booze into a Thoughtful Theme Gift

At Omnivore Books on Food, our favorite new SF bookstore,a glamorous display of cocktail books both new (The Craft of the Cocktail, by Dale DeGroff, Classic Cocktails: A Modern Shake, by Mark Kingwell) and old (the 1948 Drink by Andre Simon, The Commonsense Book of Drinking, from 1960, by Leon D. Adams) reminded us that if you pair such a volume with a nice bottle of alcohol, hey presto! You've got an excellent themed gift. (A volume that neatly combines both old and new is the reprint edition of the excellent Savoy Cocktail Book.)

If you want to go the extra mile, muddlers, bar measures, and cocktail stirrers are available all over town, from such relatively posh locales as Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and Crate and Barrel right down to your local hardware store. And if you really want to go the extra mile, Omnivore has in stock a rare first edition copy of the 1869 cocktail book Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks, which includes recipes for "Yankee Punch," "Elephant's Milk," and "Elixir de Violettes, and priced at only $500! --Meredith Brody