I’m an idiosyncratic book buyer, which is not the same thing as an idiosyncratic book reader. As a book reader, I expect I’m typical of most people my age: brave in the face of digital disruption but sometimes wistful for childhood habits, leaning over my eReader at the breakfast table then curling up on a couch in the evening with an old-fashioned paperback. But as a book buyer, my habits are unmediated by my digital struggles. As a book buyer, my predilections are determined entirely by the book as a physical commodity. I care about how it feels in my hands, the smell of the glue, the crackle of the binding, the texture of the paper. I also care about those things which give a book its unique character or, to take things further, its distinctive personality. Unlike used book sellers when they purchase their stock, I prefer books with epigraphs, interlineations, and marginalia. To my way of thinking, a book becomes valuable as it is spoiled. Who owned it? What did they make of it? What further thoughts did it inspire? It is the owner’s spoliations that help me answer these questions.
Thanks to a recent household water incident, I’ve had to pack up all my belongings and move out while contractors repair the damage. While sorting through books, I stumbled upon something I had forgotten about. I can’t remember where or when I bought it, but the why is obvious. The book is titled 101 Nights of Romance. It’s the Joy of Sex for people who like euphemisms. It’s binding is complicated. Each of its 101 chapters is sealed in its own tear-away package, with a perforated seal, like the instructions for a secret mission. While the subject matter is appealing, and while the binding is interesting, I didn’t buy the book for the subject matter or the binding; I bought it for the photograph that fell out when I was leafing through the pages.
Inserted inside the front cover I found a photo of a young woman dressed in black underwear and standing on a rumpled bed. The woman is holding a sign: I love you. The walls are bare. There is a hint of a tattoo just below the woman’s midriff. She has screwed up her face into what I presume is a precursor to the pouty big-lipped selfie pose of the Instagram era. But this grainy photo was shot on film long before Instagram was a twitch in Kevin Systrom’s and Mike Krieger’s shorts. The expression suggests that the woman hadn’t fully prepared her pose before the shutter was released.
While, ordinarily, I am sensitive to matters of personal dignity, in this instance, I’m inclined to say: Dignity Be Damned! This photograph raises too many questions for me to let it alone. Given that I discovered it as an insert in a book about romance, my initial supposition is that the book was intended as a gift to the woman’s lover; she was using the photograph to indicate that she came as part of the package. After all, a book about romance isn’t much use if you don’t have someone handy to practise on. But who took the photo? Surely not the lover. This is the sort of book that cries out: offer me as a surprise. A friend, then? Or a sibling? That would account for the altogether unromantic expression on the woman’s face. Even so, the person taking the photo would have to be someone on intimate terms with the woman, someone who understood her desire to enjoy (demand?) more from her lover, someone familiar enough that they wouldn’t be embarrassed to watch as the woman undressed.
If I were a twenty-year-old, I might also wonder why the woman stopped at her bra and panties. Why not take off all her clothes? It’s worth reminding ourselves that even twenty years ago, most people couldn’t “develop” their own photos. I use quotation marks around the word develop to underscore the difference between chemical and digital processing. Now, the photo is “developed” instantaneously on your iPhone. But twenty years ago, you probably sent it out from the local drugstore where the image was viewed by one, if not several, strangers before it was returned as a print. In the days before digital/social media, this fact seemed sufficient to curtail our most extreme exhibitionist tendencies. Now, the woman would probably pose in the buff, and rather than hold a sign, she would embed her message in the sext she sent to her lover. The process would impoverish used book purchasers like me.
The photograph—or at least its context—raises one more question. When I purchased the book from the used book seller, it was almost intact. Only the first tear-away had been torn away, the first mission accepted, the first of 101 nights romanced. What happened to the other 100 nights? Did the relationship fall apart soon after the gift was received? Was there something wrong with the first night? Or…and this is where my imagination gets the better of me…what if the woman ended up ditching her lover in favour of the photographer?
I tend to think of photographers as geeky sidekicks. The beefy stars are the ones who get all the action while their skinny adjuncts, although necessary to the enterprise, go unrecognized (because they’re holding the camera). But sometimes it’s fun to cheer for the geeky sidekick. There’s something gratifying about the thought that maybe, in this situation, the beefy star lost out. Maybe the photographer persuaded the woman that romance doesn’t happen by baring everything in front of a lens, but only after the camera is set aside, when things can proceed unseen.