The Business of Book Styling

Yay book styling.

“Isn't the Book supposed to be in decline—its authority eroding, its informational tax base fleeing to suburbs of impeccably edged and weeded silicon? Five minutes with the tasteful Pottery Barn catalog of March 1995 may be somewhat reassuring. A closed universe of about fifty books circulates decoratively in its pages. The Pottery Barn catalog’s library may have been selected for the alpha-wave-inducing beige and blue-gray and dull red of its bindings, but the actual titles, which are nearly but not quite unreadable, sometimes betray reserves of emotion. In the tranquillity of a cool living room, a cream-colored book entitled Tongues of Flame appears, minus its jacket, on a shelf of the Trestle Bookcase, near the Malabar Chair. Then it shows up in some peaceful shots of iron end tables. Next, on the page that offers what the Pottery Barn's furniture-namers call a Library Bed—‘a bed whose broad panels suggest the careful woodworking found in old English libraries’—a historical novel called A Rose for Virtue makes its quiet entrance, underneath a handsome ivory-toned telephone. Three pages later comes the big moment, the catalog's clinch: for, lying at the foot of the Scroll Iron Bed, open facedown on the cushion of the Scroll Iron Bench, as if it were being read, is a half-hidden volume that can be positively identified as Tongues of Flame, and leaning fondly, or even ardently, against it, at a slight angle, is A Rose for Virtue. Whether the rose's virtue survives this fleeting flammilingus, we are not told; it's enough to know that the two books, after their photographic vicissitudes, are together at last.

“So I went to the library again, and checked out Tongues of Flame. It's a collection of short stories, by Mary Ward Brown, which was published by Dutton in 1986. (There is also a novel called Tongues of Flame, by Tim Parks, set in England, that came out in 1985, but the large pale-gold letters on the binding of the Dutton edition are unmistakable.) The title story is about a married woman who wants to help a stuttering drunk reform his life by taking him to church. Her program seems to work at first, but one evening the preacher delivers a sermon so potent it sends the alarmed man right back to the bottle; in a matter of hours, his clumsy cigarette-smoking has set fire to the church. ‘Save the Bible!’ hollers one of the parishioners as the flames rise from the roof, and it is eventually saved.”

This essay, by the way, is one of only two instances of the word “flammilingus” found by Google. Having been impressed previously by ChatGPT’s ability to deduce the meanings of rare words from the context [1], I quoted the above to it preceded by this prompt: “The following is an excerpt from the essay ‘Books as Furniture’ by Nicholson Baker. What do you think ‘flammilingus’ means here?” Here is its response:

“In this excerpt, ‘flammilingus’ is a made-up word that is likely a combination of ‘flaming’ (as in ‘set on fire’) and ‘cunnilingus’ (oral stimulation of the female genitals). In the context of the passage, it is used in reference to the historical novel ‘A Rose for Virtue’ and the collection of short stories ‘Tongues of Flame,’ which are placed next to each other in a catalog and described as ‘leaning fondly, or even ardently, against it, at a slight angle.’ The author is using this playful wordplay to suggest that the two books are in close proximity and possibly interacting with each other in some way, although the true meaning and intent behind this word is not clear.”

[1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/unknownwords.html