There is a particular kind of person who is impossible to buy a book for. They have already read the one you were about to give them. They have an opinion about the translation. They own it in hardback and in paperback, and they have feelings about both.
This is the central problem with gifts for book lovers: the obvious gift is a book, and the obvious gift is the one most likely to miss. So, year after year, the people who love readers most end up giving them the same things instead. A candle that smells vaguely of a library. A mug with a clever line on it. Another tote bag. None of it touches the thing the reader actually cares about, which is the book itself, and the hours spent inside it.
The problem with giving a reader another book
A book is a generous gift and a risky one. You are choosing for someone whose taste you may know less well than you think. Give the wrong one and it sits on the shelf, unread, a small monument to a near miss. Give the right one and you have, at best, matched what they would have bought for themselves anyway.
A gift that isn't a book, for someone who only wants books
A bookmark is the rare object that belongs to the world of reading without competing with it. It asks nothing. It does not need to be the right title. It goes into whatever they are reading now, and whatever they read next, for years.
Most bookmarks, though, are not worth giving. They are printed on thin card, sold by the till, lost in a drawer within a week. For this to work as a gift, it has to be better than the scrap of paper the reader would otherwise have grabbed for free.
What you are actually giving
A fine art bookmark is a photograph, printed on the same cotton paper museums use for limited editions, and finished by hand. It is heavy in a way card is not. It is numbered, one of one hundred. It outlasts the book it is in, and the next one, and the one after that.
So you are not really giving a bookmark. You are giving the reader a small, permanent object to keep in the place where they spend their evenings.
A set of five, in a black box
For a gift, the set of five is the natural choice. Five photographs from a single series, stacked in a black presentation box that fits in the palm of one hand, with a card that names the series. It looks like what it is: something chosen, not grabbed.
The reader who already has every book does not need another one. They need the small thing that goes inside it to be as good as what they are reading.