Gift guides
Written for the person buying. Most of what we recommend is not ours.
A gift guide is usually a list of things the writer would like to be paid to sell you. These are not that. Each one starts from the person you are buying for — what they already own, what they will actually use, and what tends to go wrong — and most of the suggestions in them come from somewhere else entirely.
One of ours appears in each guide, in the place where it honestly fits and nowhere else. If a Muse card is the wrong answer for your person, the guide says so and points you elsewhere. That is the only way a guide like this is worth reading twice.
Five guides
- What to give an astronomer
- For the person who owns the telescope already. Why equipment is the wrong instinct, what to give instead, and why star-naming registries land as an embarrassment.
- What to give for a tenth anniversary
- Ten years is the tin and aluminum year. What the tradition actually means, and how to honor it without buying a novelty tin.
- Dark academia gifts
- For the aesthetic, not the costume. What separates an object that belongs in a dark academia life from a prop that photographs well once.
- What to give a historian
- For historians, archivists and teachers — people who spend their working life on other people's records and rarely get one of their own.
- What to give a writer
- For writers, with one test applied throughout: will it still be in use a year from now, or in a drawer by February?
The cards
Nine Muses, engraved into black anodized aluminum. Four are out of the workshop.
Follow the workshop
Five Muses are still to come. Until the letter is ready, the shop announces each one as it leaves the workshop.