Book-A-Day 2018 #146: Erotica: The Fine Art of Sex by Edward Lucie-Smith

I'm sure there are worse literary offenses than quoting your own poetry at length in a supposedly non-fictional book.

None come to mind at the moment, but there must be some.

Edward Lucie-Smith does that in Erotica: The Fine Art of Sex. I've tried to forgive him for it. He also presents what's basically a art-history monograph, in a somewhat popularized form, with copious references to specific paintings and other artworks, but then embeds that monograph in a book with copious illustrations of other paintings and other artworks, of similar style and appeal.

(Speaking of quoting, Lucie-Smith has another odd habit: in every chapter, he has a long quote from someone, generally someone old and dead enough to be in the public domain, and then has a shorter pull-quote from the middle of that longer pieces, within a couple of pages of each other. I'm not sure if it's that these are his very favorite quotes of all time, so he wants to keep using them, or if he had a very limited budget for permissions or just words, and had to budget himself severely.)

I'm sure some of the paintings referenced in the text are also reproduced in the book. It would have to happen at least a few times by chance. But the text never says "see page 47," so connecting the two is left to any obsessive readers.

Erotica is a 1997 British book which I saw in its 2003 American edition from Hydra Publishing. I'm sure it existed entirely because sex sells -- and low-priced art books of sex sold quite well in those years before we all had high-speed internet. And I have a copy, I'm pretty sure, because the book-club company I worked for was publishing an edition of Erotica, and I was in the habit then of just grabbing every single book that looked even vaguely of interest.

It sat on the shelf for around fifteen years because a random book of sexy art isn't generally the next thing anyone wants to read under normal circumstances. But I'm doing Book-A-Day this year precisely to clear out random books of various kinds, so I took a whack at it.

And my considered opinion is that no one connected with the publication of the book -- except possible Lucie-Smith -- actually expected anyone to read the text. It's dry, dull in a vaguely academic way, organized haphazardly, and, as I said above, only very loosely connected to the art reproduced here, which is the whole point of this book.

What a reader would want from a book like Erotica is, on the low end, to be titillated for a while and then go on to other things. On the high end, one could hope it would give a potted art-history lecture, focusing on the saucy stuff, that would give you some interesting new facts you could use in your life. Erotica does hit that low end, though the art reproduced here is mostly newer and more heavily photographic than that discussed in the text -- still art photography, though, not anything from skin magazines. But I didn't kind it hit anywhere near the high end: I didn't learn a thing from it, and was bored and confused much of the time, which is not what one wants from a book about sexy art.

Book-A-Day 2018 #132: Building New York by Bruce Marshall

Sometimes you need to figure out why a book exists before you can really understand it. If you think a book exists because of X, when it really was Y, you can get a confused sense of its success.

Building New York is a classy coffee-table book, published by the Universe imprint of the very classy art-book publisher Rizzoli in 2005, featuring a lot of glorious, mostly black-and-white, pictures of New York buildings and other major construction projects (bridges, tunnels, subways, etc.)

So far, so clear. Ah! But it's written by Bruce Marshall, who founded Reader's Digest's "general books" program and afterward became a noted book packager -- and the book itself is copyright Getty Images. That gets us much closer to the truth.

This is a book that exists because Getty has a lot of pictures, and wants them to provide a revenue stream. They get a certain amount of money from passive licensing -- an ad campaign here, a random designer pulling an image from their site there -- but every content owner wants more leverage, more active programs, and more money. I have to presume that the gigantic Getty database is tagged in various ways, and some smart chappie realized they could output the overlap of "New York City" and "Construction" for the purposes of building a book around those pictures.

This is that book. It doesn't have as much structure as it seems like it should, and its coverage of major architects and other figures (Robert Moses gets his own section, but no one else) feels perfunctory and beside the point. And that's because all of those things were beside the point. Getty had pictures: Getty made those pictures into a book that would generate more revenue.

Those pictures are quite nice: Getty is the gold standard of picture archives, after all, and NYC has been heavily documented for its entire existence. People who know more about photography than me would probably point out that there are some actually famous photos in this book, by actually famous photographers. (I'm pretty sure of that, though I couldn't tell you exactly which or why.)

So Building New York is not a book to read: it does have words in it, pleasingly arranged, covering all of these construction projects in turn, but those words are primarily to keep the pictures from bumping into each other and only secondarily to tell the reader facts. This is a book to look at -- to place, slightly askew, on a big glass-topped coffee table, and to pick up now and then when you can't find anything good on Netflix. If you're in the market for a book like that, this is a good 'un.

Erotic Photography edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Marilyn Jaye Lewis

Gather 'round, children. I'm going to tell you a story of the dark days Before the Internet. Once upon a time, pictures of naked people were difficult to find, and some of us -- particularly those of us who were young and male, as I was in those days -- would go through all sorts of convolutions in order to see naked people. (Preferably attractive female naked people, in most cases. But not always.)

And so there came to be Playboy, which lived in secret places in many homes, hidden or left in plain sight by many Dads and found by many offspring. There also came to be a myriad other magazines of varying levels of smut, some of which those young strivers discovered in their homes, some of which they discovered through older compatriots, and some of which they blushingly bought with their own money and hid away. There also came to be the great Cinemax, particularly late-night Cinemax. And there were nastier, rawer items available on VHS and in remarkably expensive print form from very shady purveyors in disreputable areas usually far from where we lived.

At the same time, there were slightly older young men who thought it would be neat to take pictures of naked young women themselves. (As with so many things: many were called, but few were chosen...most obviously, few were chosen by actual naked female models.) Some did it for the sexual thrill, though they generally were very careful not to emphasize that motivation. Some claimed to be serious photographers, interested in shapes and shadows and the play of light...as long as there was a naked female in the middle of all that stuff. Some had other motivations as well: professional photographers of other genres trying something else, hobbyists getting excited, and the much-rarer-than-claimed boyfriend of a real exhibitionist, among others. Some of their pictures appeared in the smutty magazines, but some aimed at Art -- or, at least, aimed at galleries and publications that claimed the mantle of Art, which is close enough.

Some of those photographers even made a living from it -- I doubt as many do now, in our lesser age, aiming at Art rather than a sequence of fifteen pictures of a particular woman embodying at least two fetishes for niche websites. But, in those days, many of them had big classy Art Books of their work, and some still do, even in our Internet Age.

Erotic Photography is a time-capsule of the moment after the Internet had made sex ubiquitous and open and it still looked like people would continue buying smut that they liked. (Spoiler Alert! They didn't.) It has four pages of artsy black-and-white photos of mostly pale naked young women -- of various body shapes but tending to the slim -- by each of a hundred or so photographers active around fifteen years ago. Some people will be able to make specific artistic judgments among those photographers; for me, they all looked pretty much the same kind of thing.

That's a nice thing, admittedly -- I do like pictures of attractive naked female persons, as I said above -- but I didn't see much difference between the photographers besides obvious choices of props (this set likes B&D equipment, this other set always works in inky black rooms, a smaller group cherishes the great outdoors, and so on) and, in a smaller way, models.

There are some naked men in here, but not many. And a few of the photographers are female, which didn't seem to make much of a difference. This book is older than its years, now, lapped several times by a much quicker mode of communications that is much better at delivering smut at precisely calibrated levels to all of the citizens of the world. That doesn't make it a bad book, but it might make it an entirely superseded commercial product, which is sad enough.

Some People I Know May Need This

This would go on the tumblr, if I weren't deliberately putting all content here to make it seem more lived-in and cozy.

(via one of those massively parallel content farms I refuse to link to.)

And this is now the second time within a week that I've wanted to create the tag "Snap Snap Wink Wink Grin Grin," which means I have to do it.

My New Look

Since all of the cool kids are jumping off a bridge this week, I was compelled to do the same. You can generate your own fake pulp cover here -- it's one of the really good generators, with lots of controls to fiddle around with things.