Notes of Alignment. [veneration of the book]

(this post was first published as Collective Investigations: Wednesday Post)

The first book I remember seeing was the sacred book, at Mass; it had been placed in full view on the altar, and the priest turned the pages with great respect. My first book was therefore an object of worship. (Carriere, p.294)

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An icon of Christ in an antique shop in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Ley lines mark alignments formed by sacred sites or sites of spiritual significance. Arnolfini Ley is a reading line, which runs between the Library of Trinity College in Dublin and the Library of Alexandria, connecting book related sites. They are special locations marked by the book - an object of spiritual veneration, yet a very material one.
 
Book indeed is an ambiguous object, reliant on the reader to transform it from an object to an abject. Its existence is defined not solely by its physical presence, but also by its immaterial content: book can be a heavy volume of the Bible as well the sacred word of God it contains; it can be an intricately luxurious Sangorski binding and the ethereal rubaiyats of Omar Khayyám included into it. Holding the book allows us to admire it as an object. Reading, however, allows transmission of the intangible between the book and the person. 

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Fitzgerald, Edward; Illustrated by F. Sangorski and G. Sutcliffe.

Levantine Jews were the first to turn the act of reading into a ritual, the practice, which will later be picked up by Christians and make the base of Christian liturgy.

Babylonians and Assyrians had greatly respected magical texts. […] The respect had never entailed veneration of the written word itself, that is, the sanctification of writing and its physical material. The Levantine Jews introduced just such a sanctification, thereby adding a whole new dimension to reading. (Fischer, p 60)

Reading the Torah during Feast of Tabernacles

In discussing ritualistic reading of Leviticus, Wesley J. Bergen suggests, that reading can even replace ritual sacrifice. Text, he says, is not a ritual. It is a text about ritual and it is a sign of absent ritual. It was written to be read and performed, to encourage participation.  Like in the contemporary Christian liturgy, “text becomes part of sacred space and time, the reading of the text becomes part of the ritual.”

Thus, the ritual “reading” Leviticus’ becomes a subsitute for the ritual animal sacrifice. […] Thus, the textualisation of the ritual is balanced by the ritualisation of the text. The command by God to Moses (to speak these words) is fulfilled even while no animals are killed. The movement from animal sacrifice to reading of texts involves some loss and some gain, as all change does. So there is no loss of ritual, only it’s transformation. (Bergen, p7)

Book as the embodied word of God existed throughout the Middle Ages at the center of Christian ritual. Heavily adorned Bibles, often containing relicts of the saints, were seen as incarnations of Christ himself. Early parchment bindings must have made the “body of Christ” metaphor even more visual: the books were made of animal skins, with pores visible on the surface of the page along the words God.  There is certainly something macabre yet sublime in having earthly flesh support the holy scripture.

The analogy between the body of Christ and the letter of scripture would become a Christian commonplace, leading to a long Christian tradition that attempted to apprehend the mystery of Christ as Word through visions of Christ as book. (Kearney, p. 14)

First class relic of Saint Pope John Paul II incased in a Golden Bible

Curiously, I found the idea of incarnate Word explicitly reinforced as as recently as 1965,  by Pope Paul VI in Dei Verbum ( the Second Vatican Council).

The Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord, since, especially in the sacred liturgy, she unceasingly receives and offers to the faithful the bread of life from the table both of God's word and of Christ's body. She has always maintained them, and continues to do so, together with sacred tradition, as the supreme rule of faith, since, as inspired by God and committed once and for all to writing, they impart the word of God Himself without change, and make the voice of the Holy Spirit resound in the words of the prophets and Apostles. (Dei verbum) 

A good example of a ritual book is the Book of Kells, currently kept at the the Library of Trinity College in Dublin, our first point on Arnolfini Ley. This elaborately produced manuscript was produced with the purpose of it being displayed and worshiped. The book remained in Kells through Middle Ages, venerated as the gospel of St Colum Cille, a relic of the saint, brought to Kells together with another book (possibly Book of Durrow) (Library of Trinity College Dublin). The current binding of the Book of Kells exists as four  volumes. The original, however, was one heavy and substantial object. Not unlike religious architecture, such book was not meant to be carried around. It was also not designed to be used for study or even reading. Like churches and cathedrals which housed such manuscripts, medieval altar Bibles were there to evoke awe and reverence, elated to an ineffable and noetic religious experience. They were mediators between the God and the man, in the same way that other icons, relicts, and the the church itself were.

The Book of Kells

It was Reformation that shook up the idea of book as a venerated gilded icon: a process that led Christianity from piety focused upon image to piety focused upon word (Kearney, p. 25) As Erasmus said - scripture and not picture should be at the center of religious experience. Reformation, of course, overlapped with the invention of printing press and a remarkably rapid growth of available printed texts across Europe as well as the spread of literacy.  While Kearney calls this period "the crisis of the book”, it was a period of crisis only in understanding of its the place in faith and liturgy.  All agree, that reading is a transformative act, powerful enough to convert the reader to “true religion” (yet, the reader can be easily corrupted, of course). Seemingly, it was in this period that veneration of the ineffable content of the book overtook veneration of book as an icon. It is not a viewer in the presence of the scripture that benefits from the book, it is the reader.

Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece, excerpt, 1432

Veneration of the book needs an active reader, to transform it from an object to an abject. Adoration is not directed purely at the material qualities of the book, but at the noetic aspects of the experience. Like sacred sites, relics, cathedrals (or even, us, people)  books stand not only as solid structures, but also as embodiments of the metaphysical ideas and experiences.

[Egidija]

At a Book (c.1882). Marie Bashkirtseff (Ukrainian, 1858-1884). Oil on canvas. Kharkiv Art Museum.

PS
There is an interesting story which takes worship of the Word of God one step further, bridging it into veneration of any material text.

Ernst Curtius records an anecdote concerning Francis of Assisi in which “the saint picked up every written piece of parchment which he found on the ground, even if it were from a pagan book. Asked by a disciple why he did so, Francis answered: “Fifi me, litteme sum ex quibus componitur gloriosissimum Dei nomen. [My son, these are the letters out of which the glorious name of God is formed].” Here, the incarnation of the logos means that all language - fragments of text, scraps of parchment - has been glorified. Writing itself is sacred. (Kearney, p15)

SOURCES:
Bergen, Wesley (2005) Reading Ritual: Leviticus in Postmodern Culture.  New York: T & T Clark International
Carriere, Jean-Claude; Umberto Eco (2009) This is not the End of the Book. London: Harvill Secker
Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation: Dei Verbum: Solemnly Promulgated by His Holiness Pope Paul V on November 18, 1965 [Online]. Available at http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html   (Accessed:  19 March 2017)
Fisher, Steven Rodger (2003) A History of Reading. London: Reaktion Books.
Kearney, James (2009) The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
The Book of Kells [Online]. Available at https://www.tcd.ie/library/manuscripts/book-of-kells.php     (Accessed:  19 March 2017)

→ from book to film to book in a fanny dance

 .

(…) as we begin to read, a temporal process commences, which in addition to the two dimensions of surface and to the dimension of space—we think of the body of the book!—brings the fourth dimension of time. One of the essential characteristics of time is that the direction in which it moves is irreversible. (Hoculli, 1996)

→ FROM

When the moving image was first invented there was a tremendous excitement about the possibilities of the new medium. It was a spectacle on par with the magic shows. Georges Méliès produced The Haunted Castle and A Trip to the Moon. Lumière Brothers produced Le Squelette joyeux and Spanish Bullfight. Watching those films it is easy to see what the joy and the fascination were all about. It was "the cinema of attractions", as Tom Gunning called it, full of "visual delights…surprises…displays of exotic, beautiful or grotesque…or other sorts of sensational thrills “ (Abel, 2005)

Those early short films - each only about 4 minutes long - certainly used and explored the moving image with imagination and dedication of Caractacus Potts. The idea of film as a non-narratative medium (or where story-telling takes a secondary role) resembles a form of an artist's book, which excites the reader with form and content, rather then the verbal story on its pages (symmetry Nr1): a short blast of unfolding enjoyment.


→ 

The adjective “well-thumbed” tends to suggest a certain monomania regarding a text (Farry, 2015)

As soon as producers realised that longer films meant bigger profits, narrative cinema was born: Cinderella (Georges Méliès) and Alice in the Wonderland (by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow) were among the first to be made. 
The parallel between book and film goes beyond a direct book adaptation. Like film, codex is inherently sequential by it's structure: there are pages (film frames) and pages (film frames) and pages (film frames) that require time to ingest in a linear order from 1 to X hundred. (symmetry Nr2). McFarlane, in contrast, compares book to a literary narrative, distinguishing word as the smallest unit in the sequence. He rightly points out, that we do not watch film frame by frame as we read novel word by word. The comment would still stand even if comparing film/frame structure to the book/page structure. However, the principle of linear time-based sequenciality remains.

Like oral or cinematic narrative, it (literary narrative) can only be "consumed", and therefore actualised, in time that is obviously reading time, and even if the sequentiality of its components can be undermined by a capricious, repetitive, or selective reading. (Genette, 1980)

 → BOOK TO FILM TO BOOK

Film editing process requires patience, stamina and precision of a typesetter, as I realised when editing between one hand and another. It was an illuminating experience, that had me appreciate  links between book and film production and  possible transitions that I had not yet considered.

When looking for more specific bridges between the two areas, I found that most conversions between the mediums happen in reference to their inherent sequentiality (symmetry Nr2). Flip books are the ones that came to my mind first. (Is it a film? Is it a book? Is it a toy?) Flip Books ! Un livre, un pouce, un film is probably the most remarkable project of them all. The film (which was screened at this years Pages book fair), includes an anthology of 300 activated flipbooks from Pascal FOUCHÉ’s collection (France - 2007). It traces the history from the XIXth century to today and it is subdivided into categories, such as dance, animals, artist's books, publicity, etc. Remarkably, there is "no dialog, no music, only the characteristic "flip" sound, in Stereo Dolby , wow !" 

The film certainly sounds fascinating - just like the whole business of flip-books. I will be coming back to the subject very soon.

The video below does not come from Flip Books ! Un livre, un pouce, un film - I found no quality images of the project online. This video is a credit to the amazing Flipbook Collector on YouTube - great channel!

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Flip Books ! Un livre, un pouce, un film is a professional documentation of 300 books. But there are also documentation works of individual artists: artist's who work with all kinds of books (not just flipbooks) often resort to video to record their work. Because it is time-based. Personally, I like how our George documents his works. His videos and their presentation maintain the character of his books: they are a good step above a tipod+flipbook set-up. Below is an illustration from to every action there is a reaction. Take time to look at his other book videos. Immaculate.

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And here is the most obvious work of them all. DOT (DOT: The book as a video and DOT: The book) The video is a sequence of digitally reproduced letterpress prints, produced in the typography workshop of the University of Arts in Braunschweig, Germany. The pages were collected and bound to three (almost) identical books. The project’s subheading refers to this coexistence of print and digital video.

 

It is an interesting project which requires spotless skills of a typesetter and a video editor. I loved the experimental idea of it, however - as for the rest - it was somewhat underwhelming. I wonder what Romano Hänni could have done with the video!

→

(…) as we begin to read, a temporal process commences, which in addition to the two dimensions of surface and to the dimension of space—we think of the body of the book!—brings the fourth dimension of time. One of the essential characteristics of time is that the direction in which it moves is irreversible. (Hoculli, 1996)

 








PS. → IN A FANNY DANCE 
Visual books use even more cinematic features: such as panning, flashbacks, eye-line matching, etc. I was also going to include video poetry (I did, in fact, and I deleted), photobooks and animation (flipbook linked), and then I realised that I was digging too deep and this whole blog post was getting out of my hands. So I stopped. Leaving some great subjects and artists to tackle next time.



Sources:

Abel, Richard (2005) "Cinema of Attractions." Encyclopedia of Early Cinema . New York. p. 124.

Buchan, Suzanne (2013) Pervasive Animation. Routledge p. 63

Chilyan, Tagui (2011) The Development of Narrative Film. Hitrecord: http://www.hitrecord.org/records/402381

Genette, Gerard (1980) Narrative Discourse. New York: Cornell University Press. p. 34. 
Hochuli, Jost & Kinross, Robin. Designing books: practice and theory. Hyphen Press. London,1996. p.12 

Farry, Oliver (2015) "The crack of the spine: why do we find wear and tear in books so comforting?". New Statesman: Feb 19, 2015 http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/02/crack-spine-why-do-we-find-wear-and-tear-books-so-comforting 
McFarlane, Brian (1996) Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
 

[Egidija]

→ currious lens devices between the reader and the world

[ this blog post was first published at Wednesday Post by Collective Investigations]

An instrument of natural magic may reappear as a philosophical instrument, as an instrument of entertainment, or as a practical "invention" in a new guise" (Hankins and Silverman, 1995)

 

I.

and all we are left with is the world
window vinyls and a set of three artists’ books, including viewing devices



On Wednesday, February 25th, 2015 In a Bookshell opens at Milton Gallery @ St Paul's School, SW13 9JT, London. Among many wonderful, innovative, surprising and creepy pieces of bookworks Collective Investigations will also have two pieces on display: 1. between one hand and another (a video installation) and 2. and all we are left with is the world (book installation). This blogpost refers to the first one.

and all we are left with is the world is an installation about perception. It consists of three artist's books and three viewing lenses on the window sill. The books contain scholarly quotes on optics, solipsism, and sensory experience. The lenses guide viewer’s attention to the book and then through it and into the warped space beyond, inviting us to consider the systems of perception as part of our relationship with the surrounding environment.

II.

Books and spectacles go together like horse and carriage, strawberries and cream, oysters and champagne (not quite, but always worth mentioning). Stereotypical geeks carry books and wear glasses. Bill Gates does, for example. Apparently, 53% of university graduates are nearsighted and require reading aids, as compared with 24% of those, who did not even complete secondary education.

Glasses, like books, feature often in portraiture of academically accomplished individuals and those would would wish to be considered as such. For ages men have used spectacles as props to embellish the aura of their professionalism in painting and photographs, says William Rosenthal, a collector of visual aids (Rosenthal, 1996).

and all we are left with is the world (see above ↑ ) deals with the metaphysics of looking through a lense and the sensory-perceptual experience of it. Below, ↓ I will mention a few fun, curious and wonderful devices that a part of the history of spectacles.

Apparently, there is no such thing as concise history of spectacles, because there is no agreement as for who and where invented them. Marco Polo observed elderly Chinese use spectacles in 1270. Chinese claim, that spectacles originated in the 11th century Arabia. (1)  In the meantime, in Europe Vikings were already able to grind lenses out of rock crystal. However, "proper" first spectacles are often attributed to the Italians of the Veneto region. (2)

With the invention of mechanical printing and subsequent rapid growth of publishing industries, the need for reading devices increased and inexpensive spectacles became widely available from peddlers. Finally, in the 1600s the spectacles as we recognise them now were born: the two lenses were finally fixed to a rigid bridge allowing them to stay in place on top on the nose. (1)


a.)
  ↓

From 17th century spectacles were were sold by instrument makers, who also traded in compasses, zograscopes, telescopes and other fantastical "scientific toys", that coexisted together with a range of other more or less useful instruments. Among them, were faceted lenses - multiplying glasses - which were used for entertainment and were treated as a luxury commodity (Stafford and Terpak, 2001).


b.)
 ↓

 

Another use for faceted lenses came in the form of perspective glass, or vue d'optique, which produced a convincing sense of perspective.


 c.)
   ↓

Personally, I find optical fans most fascinating! Some fans had tiny telescopes set into the centers, others had lorgnette frames folding away into the guardsticks. However, the most exciting were spyhole fans. 

For short sight a single concave lens could be mounted in one of the spyholes, effectively forming a Quizzer or Quizzing Glass. This was then further developed into a Galilean telescope by mounting a convex lens in the outer guardstick and a concave lens in the inner guardstick. Lining up the holes in the intervening sticks, when the fan was closed and the blades rested upon one another, produced a simple tube with a lens at each end. The resulting spyglass could even be adjusted for focus by varying the separation of the closed sticks. (3)

III. 

Lens devices used in art, including book art, are varied, but not abundant. Here are a couple of the works that I found most interesting. I have chosen one work of each (kind of) category.


a.) installation lens/vision
  ↓

Haruka Kojin explores the distortion of reality through her piece "Contact Lens". Two types of lenses are used, one completely flat and clear and the other with a warped surface to create interconnected circles of varying sizes. As the light travels through the acrylic, the images on the other side are flipped and contorted, changing the experience of the space. since the elements are clear with no frames or distinct features of its own, the physical material merges into the environment, only visible through the transformation it causes. 
b.) installation lens/light
  ↓

IPOcle by Candas Sisman is a light installation produced with lenses, light, mirror, sound, container, and fog. It simulates the way we perceive the reality that exists in our physical world and the various layers, variables, cycles that are present in this process of perceiving. These perceptions draw our perceptual schemas and these schemas in turn shape the reality we perceive. Our perceptions and what we perceive, therefore, constantly reshape call each other into being, as in a vicious cycle. At this point, how can we define what reality really is, what constant can we refer to, and aren’t we supposed to look at this issue in a more holistic and intertwined manner?

c.) book lens/vision
  ↓ 

Strictly speaking, this is not a work that uses lens in the optical sense of it. Artist's book READ by Jackie Batey is about the act of reading. The book was inspired by Our Mutual Friend and takes the first 20 pages of this novel but hides within them a Dickens' quote about reading. The quote describes reading as being like a code, whereby the initiated can open the world of books. The quote is hidden word by word on each page in pale turquoise that can only be seen clearly when viewed through the red lens on of the magnifying glass.



c.) artefacts lens/surprise
  ↓ 

A Glimpse of Heaven by Keith Lo Bue is an optical device made of Industrial shop ruler, clockspring, brass, brass hardware, steel, engraving, book end paper, glass bead, lenses, paper, text, soil. Keith Lo Bue tries to make connections between disparate phenomena: reality and surreality; preservation and decay; memory and forgetting. There is a deliberate effort to create in the artwork a fragile technology of bone and soil, exhumed from the scattered shards of lives preceding our own.


.

An instrument of natural magic may reappear as a philosophical instrument, as an instrument of entertainment, or as a practical "invention" in a new guise" (Hankins and Silverman, 1995)

 Sources:

(1) Ophthalmic Heritage & Museum of Vision
(2) The College of Optometrisists
(3) Online Museum and Encyclopaedia of Vision Aids 
 


Hankins, Thomas L. and Robert J. Silverman. 1995. Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. p. 221.
Rosenthal, William J. 1996. Spectacles and Other Vision Aids. San Francisco, CA: Norman Publishing. p. 358.
Strafford, Barbara Maria and Frances Terak (eds.) 2001. Devices of Wonder: from the World in a Box to Image on a Screen. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. p185.

[Egidija]

↓ reading ↓ imagining ↓ picturing ↓ procrastinating

While Bible might be delivering good news for some parts of population, in our house - it's Focus magazine. Today's issue alone is going to take a few bubble-baths of reading. So what's the good news of today? 

↓  reading

First of all, Einstein's collected papers are available online through Princeton university - a very clearly structured interface for accessing some of the most extraordinary pieces of writing of the 20th century. For example, one can now dip into a delightfully lyrical world of Einsteinian letter-writing, such as this one he sent to Mrs Curie in 1913.

"A few days have passed since the wonderful profusion of things rushed past me. The fibrils of my brain must still be in terrible disarray from all of that...." 

If science can be poetic - Einstein has certainly nailed it - of course, among a few other facts that he had nailed rather well too. Such a pleasure to read! I only wish the texts were complemented by the scans of the originals.

↓  imagining

The second bit of great news is that...  everything is in the head. It's official. Apparently, carrying out five sessions of imaginary exercise per week had positive effects on developing grip-strength in volunteers at Ohio University.  No sweaty armpits, no chlorine soaked hair, no shin splints - only five imaginary sessions which, I could perform from a hammock under linden trees.

↓  picturing

Third - not entirely everything is in the head, as page 81 suggests. Why do we get a mental picture when reading? Or - why don't we? 

Visual and auditory areas of your brain are at work when you read, as you subvocalise the words when one of the characters is speaking... All of this contributes to what we think of as pictures in our head - yet in reality our brains probably contain no such thing. Indeed, recent theories treat vision more like an activity or interaction with the world rather than a picture-making process. Oddly enough, more detailed written descriptions may not result in richer or more satisfying mental imagery. Sometimes, the simplest descriptions allow you to create your own imagined world with far more detail and emotional involvement. 

 Less is more, they suggest. It is more emotionally satisfying to be involved in creating a personalised mental imagery. This satisfaction is probably what explains the allure of haiku poems and artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto and Indrė Šerpytytė. 

Indrė Šerpytytė is one of the artists currently showing as part of Conflict Time Photography exhibition at Tate Modern. In one of the rooms (towards the end) she is showing wooden carvings of KGB interrogation houses and their studio "portraits". Refreshingly, her take on Lithuanian history is a non-judgemental, non-sentimental commentary with plenty of gaps and empty spaces for the viewer to fill in. My favorite works, however, are those from Forest Brothers series: dense treescapes, suspended between the world of Hansel-and-Gretel-fairy-tale fear of the dark forest and an honest link with factual landscape of the post-war Lithuanian resistance fighters. Less is more.

↓  procrastinating

The final good news is called WIKIGALAXY. Computer science MA(!) student Owen Cornec put together this galaxy-style visualisation of tens of thousands of Wikipaedia pages to help you get lost down even more rabbit holes of useless but fascinating information. While drifting aimlessly among his 3D paths linking various concepts, I did wonder if this could be called a binding. If the metaphor of book can extend into the digital reading media, could we not extend the notion of binding too, to denote the ways that keep separate pages of digital information together? 

 

frivolous female readers / body and book

 The original was published as Wednesday Post for Collective Investigations

This blog post is based on the research that I made for (in)discreet editions publications the discreet book of bathroom reading and those frivolous readers, which - in their own turn - were inspired by the material collected for codex: between one hand and another. 

↓↓↓

Young Woman Reading Jean Honoré Fragonard  (French, Grasse 1732–1806 Paris)

When collecting images of female readers one cannot escape an overwhelming amount of eroticised reading women,: half-dressed or with their clothes barely holding on; women draped across beds, sofas, armchairs or frozen in a blush, contemplating the contents of their naughty read. Their hair flows. Their hands are gentle. Their skin is porcelain. Their touch is sensual: the book is a tactile object; pages are frozen in the middle of movement. There might be a glimpse of breast exposed. There might be a suggestive vessel or a protruding handle somewhere close by. Their eyes are seductively lowered towards the book held at the height of the chest.

The images come from across the centuries: charged with the intimacy of body and book.

There are Belle Epoque oil paintings, vintage postcards, prints, photos in contemporary press and online social media. Apart from a couple of sightings in Medieval imagery, eroticised women readers more prominently first appear in Renaissance. At that time majority of female portraits commissioned by men were intended as decorative possessions to be "absorbed into the overall ornamentation of ostentatious domestic environment"2. 18th century saw the birth of the novel and a further rise in reading - and new concerns, in particular, about the damaging psychological effects that reading had on female body and mind. 

Terry Castle suggests that even the solitary practice of reading was seen to harbour "dangers" that included a complex dynamics of self-involvement. She explains that once "reading became dangerous because it prompted obsessional thoughts", it became possible to diagnose the reader as the victim of hallucinatory disease. 4

The processes of reading, then were gendered - eroticised and sexualised. The active masculine reader with pen in hand mastered the text no less then his household... The early modern woman as a sexual object was figured and described as a book to be opened. Female reading was frequently eroticised and implicated in the sexual body. The book held to the breast, in the lap, or concealed under the petticoats fetishised both the text and the reader. Male suspicion, even anxiety, variously imagined female reading as a source of ungovernable pleasure, in the eighteenth century even as self-pleasuring. 3

Inaccurate though the image of the idle, frivolous female novel-reader was, the stereotype did not disappear with the close of the eighteenth century1, James Raven says. 

Neither did it disappear with the close of the centuries that followed either.

What fascinates me is that the image of a "sensual reading female" predates the "sexy librarian" by good few centuries. While both images feed off each other in contemporary depiction of books and females (see the very last three images at the very end) the latter one is linked to the erotisation of intelligence as such - the same phenomenon that gives us reading Marlon Brando or reading Gregory Peck as sex symbols (not that they need a book for that!). 
Sensual reading female does not eroticise intelligence. That is sure. She is alone, relaxed, withdrawn and observed. Could she be related to the sleeping nude? If so, what does it say about the role of the book in those image?  Female sexuality? What does it say about the idea of reading? What does it say about the idea of the book?

↓↓↓

images:
 Book (reading)(woman)(sensual)   

 sources:
1 James Raven, Hellen Small and Naomi Tadmor (2007) “Introduction: The Practice and Representation of Reading in England,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (p.19)

2 Ponton, Marcia (2013) Portrayal and the Search for Identity, London: Reaktion Books Ltd. (p. 14)
3 Sharpe, Kevin and Stephen Zwicker (2003) Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (p.15)
4 Haggerty, Geroge E. (1998) Unnatural Affections. Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
 

Other almost relevant links: 
Vintage Photos of Women Readers
Unpacking an Erotic Icon: The Sexy Librarian

 

 

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