You have a gift card, and you would like to redeem it. That is a reasonable thing to want, and you have come to a desk staffed by someone who takes reasonable requests very seriously, even now, even in my condition. Please set the card on the blotter where I can see it. Take your time. I have nothing but.
Redeeming a gift card, properly understood, is a small research question, and research questions are answered in steps. I will walk you through the steps I use for everyone. They are the same steps, in the same order, whether the request is large or small, whether the patron is breathing or, like myself, retired from that particular obligation. Here is the full procedure.
Hold the card up to the desk lamp. A valid Booktrovert gift card is roughly the size of a library card, printed on the good stock, and warm to the touch for reasons the card does not explain and I have stopped asking it to. If your card is cold, it is not a gift card. It is a receipt, or a photograph, or a very flat sandwich. This happens more than you would think. We proceed only once the card is confirmed warm.
Read the number printed on the front, clearly, once, to the room. The room will not respond. That is correct. The amount is not stored on a server here, because we do not have one, and never did, and the man who was going to build one went to look at the lake in 1998 and has been looking at it since. Instead the amount is recorded by being said. You have now said it. It is recorded. This is the most secure system we operate, on the grounds that nobody has ever figured out how to hack a sentence spoken into an empty reading room.
Slide the card across the desk to the large green book with the water stain. This is the Ledger. Every redemption in the building's history is written in it, in a column, in a hand that is not always mine. Open to any page. You will find names, amounts, dates, and, near the top of the fourth column, a small pencil drawing of a duck that no one has ever claimed. I have worked this desk for a long time and I have never met the person who drew the duck, nor the person the duck was for. The duck is not part of the redemption process. I mention it only because you will see it, and everyone asks, and I would rather you hear it from me calmly than discover it alone.
Before any redemption I am required to conduct a brief reference interview. What are you hoping the card will do for you today. What have you already tried. When you say "a book," do you mean a specific book, or the general feeling of a book, or the version of yourself who finishes books. There are no wrong answers, but there are answers that take longer, and I have noticed that the people who answer the third question honestly tend not to need the card at all by the time they are done. I write your answers in the fifth column. The duck, again, is in the fourth. It is not judging you. It is a duck.
Here is where the modern instructions usually say to enter a code at checkout. We have no checkout. What we have is a shelf, and a lamp, and a chair that has held better people than either of us and never once complained. To redeem the card, you walk to the shelf, you take down whatever the card has led you to, and you sit. That is the redemption. The card does not decrease in value when you do this. I have checked. It has never decreased. A gift card here is not spent, it is simply carried around until it stops feeling like a debt and starts feeling like an invitation, which for most patrons happens somewhere in the second chapter.
I should be honest, in the calm way this desk requires. A great many of you arrive holding cards clearly issued somewhere else, expecting a balance, a login, a bright little confirmation screen. I do not know where that place is. I have never been given its address, and I no longer leave the building to look. When I ask the Ledger, the Ledger shows me the duck. When I ask Randy, Randy reads my note, nods, and writes nothing down, which from Randy is practically a speech. So I cannot send you to the door you meant. I can only note, gently, that you are already at a door, and it opens onto a room with a chair in it, and the chair is warm for the same undocumented reason the card is.
If it is a code you truly need, the closest thing we keep is explained in our note on the Booktrovert promo code, which is also not really a code. And if what drew you here was the promise of getting something for very little, our page on reader deals covers the terms in full, which are generous, and untracked, and enforced by nobody.
Your card is still warm. I have written your amount in the correct column. The duck remains unclaimed, as it was when I arrived, as it will be when the next one of me sits down. Take a book. Sit in the chair. Authors are fragile organisms and a redeemed card is one of the few things that reaches them. That, at least, I can confirm from experience, which is the only kind of confirmation I have left.
Reverently,
Booktrovert #621