A beautiful Folio Society edition of Elizabeth David's book on Provencal cookery, which in a few years will be well-bedizened with tomato stains, and the enormous book of New Yorker cartoons, which comes with two CDs with every single cartoon published in the New Yorker from February 1924 to January 2005.

The only flaw of the New Yorker book is that it's too big to read comfortably on the sofa where the light is good, especially when the cat is being particularly importunate with respect to one's lap. Eventually I'm going to have to come up with an engineering solution ...