TURNING THE PAGE

By MICHAEL PERKINS

DURING AN INTERVIEW EARLY ON IN HIS DIRECTORIAL CAREER, Martin Scorcese once confessed to (gasp) a crime.

Relating stories of his poor childhood to a reporter, he rhapsodized about how essential his local library was in his younger years, especially the very few volumes dedicated to cinema history in the Queens of the early 1950’s. He had his favorites, and borrowed them as frequently as he could, but the images within one special work, Deems Taylor’s  A Pictorial History of the Movies, burned their way into his mind in a such a singular way that he simply could not bear to part with them, and he succumbed to his passion by ripping out selected pages and spiriting them home. Hardly the stuff of Goodfellas, but, as a fellow book nerd, I can relate.

And, as a photographer, I am still falling madly, deeply, weirdly in love with books, and in many cases, I find it torture to prevent myself from “pulling a Scorcese” and carting the odd volume away. The elegance, the design, the permanence of books penetrates to my soul, and so it’s fortunate that I have had a camera on hand when eyeing other people’s libraries over the years; it’s kept me out of the pokey.

In the case of the collection of Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems seen here, “our” meeting was most random. Marian and I rented an AirB&B for a recent vacation stay, a lovely little casita outfitted with wonderful taste by its owner, who truly went the extra mile on decor, making the space resemble a cozy, settled household rather than a rental unit. One of the nicer touches was her use of variously sized books, the kinds sold in lots as visual props, and available from many design houses. Most were recent novels of no distinction, added merely for color and texture, and so the Browning volume was striking in that it looked not only a great deal older, but was also more intricately detailed and designed.

It was a triumph of little touches. Its title page illustration of Ms. B. was protected by a delicate tissue (still intact). Its binding was gnarled and pebbled. Its pages were  slightly browned at the corners. Its typefaces were elegant and intricate. I seriously teetered for a moment on the brink of “should I snag this?” but defaulted to a tabletop homage instead, making the old poetic word for pages, or “leaves”, into  literal bookmarks, and using a Lensbaby Velvet 56  for a soft, ethereal glow. And so, without resorting to thievery, I now owned something of the original book, and yet something uniquely mine as well. That’s what a photograph can do; it uses reality as a mere point of departure, with the ultimate destination  anyone’s guess.