Identity

A few years ago, the Christmas catalog of a California publishing house featured a “made-to-order” children’s gift item: a “Me-Book.” All the “Me-Books” contained the same full-page color illustrations and a bit of the prose was the same also. Other than that, each book was highly personalized. The idea was that the buyer would send the publisher personal information about the child to whom the book was to be given: name, age, birthday, address, names of brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, friends, pets, etc. Thus, when the data was keyed into the publisher’s computer, out came a book in which the child receiving the gift was the main character. A boy named Patrick was given one of these books for Christmas by his grandmother. The boy’s father said later,

You can hardly imagine Patrick’s surprise and delight when he pulled the gift out from under the Christmas tree, unwrapped it, and began to read: “Once upon a time, in a little town called Hendersonville, there lived…