The second book will be an oddity: An Illustrated History of Reinforced Concrete, say, or a collection of 19th century sermons, something that it's hard to believe was ever published. All second-hand bookshops abound in such volumes.
The aim of the gift is to raise a laugh but also to suggest that I am a quirky and distinctive giver of gifts. So it was that I bought The Observer's Book of the Larger British Moths by R.L.E. Ford, F.R.E.S., F.Z.S, published in 1952. If that didn't make birthday girl smile, along with everyone else at the dinner table, then I'd have misjudged them all.
But she never got to unwrap it. Because I dipped into it. And having dipped I couldn't part with it.
"The Goat Moth obtains its name from the smell of both the larva and the moth and anything with which they come in contact …. The larva is bright pink along the back, yellow along the sides, and has a black head.
"It is also shiny and smooth. If you find one you should keep it in a metal container, since it can bore its way through thick wood."
Here is the unmistakable voice of experience. You just know that R. L. E. Ford, F.R.E.S., F.Z.S. has come home many times smelling of goat moth and has had the caterpillars bore their way out of his collection box.
Look at the simplicity of the English. He has facts to relate and he means to do so without vanity or embellishment. There's a forthright modesty here. His interest is the material world around him. But there is more to it than that.
Here is an attitude that has been largely lost to television and shopping.
It is an optimistic, amateur world of relentless intellectual enquiry. "It is hoped those interested in moths will not be content to catch a specimen and possibly ascertain its name and then let it go … By obtaining eggs or by finding caterpillars and keeping them until they hatch out into moths you can have a very interesting and also instructive pastime."
It's the Science Museum meets the Boy Scout movement. You can picture Mr Ford: tweed suit, scrawny, pipe-smoking perhaps but otherwise abstemious of habit, perhaps a thin moustache. He would find the modern city rebarbative and a burger bar incomprehensible. His nature sings from the page.
"This means going up to the low branches of an oak or other suitable tree and holding underneath it an open umbrella, upside down to catch things, and then tapping the branches smartly with a stick. All kinds of life will come down from the leaves and amongst it you should find some interesting larvae."
You can picture him on a spring afternoon with bicycle, umbrella, stick, collecting boxes, a packet of sandwiches in grease-proof paper and a battered thermos flask, half adult scientist, half eager schoolboy.
He's the heir of the European enlightenment, the thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries, and in particular the great naturalists, prime among them Darwin, but of whom there were thousands.
The letters after his name tell us he was a fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and the Zoological Society.
These were Victorian creations, dedicated to the advancement of learning. Their members believed in intellectual progress by close study of what was. They aimed to know this world. Their faith in science was absolute.
Here's part of his entry for the wolf leopard moth. "Formerly this species was a pest in orchards … the modern insecticides appear to have overcome this."
There's an innocence and a hope in those words that embody the age I was born into, but that has been largely lost. Modern insecticides in 1952 would have meant DDT. I'll keep the book.
