It’s Behind You

When looking at photos I always look beyond the smiling faces of those immortalised on celluloid at what’s going on in the background. Often this is far more interesting as it reveals all sorts of stuff about the circumstances in which the photo was taken and provides a natural snapshot of time that’s all the better for being unposed and (and for the most part disregarded) by whoever took the photo.

The reverse of the dust jacket for the adult version of the latest Harry Potter depicts the obligatory black and white photo of the author standing in front of his/her bookcase, and an examination of the contents of the bookshelf itself reveals a right old mixed bag of non-fictional fruit and literary nuts.

There’s a mix of classics, modernist and contemporary, from the letters of Jane Austen to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and even Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole diaries. Other volumes include a collection of Agatha Christie, a Trollope and a Peter Cook.

Vladimir Nabokov also features (the title isn’t quite clear, but it’s probably not Lolita as I doubt the publishers wouldn’t want that on the back of one of the best-selling children’s books of all time), as does Freud: even schoolboy psychoanalysts can read a wealth of meaning into wand-waving and invisibility cloaks. There’s also a strange lesbian section including The Ladies of Llangollen, and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. The rest of the titles are too unclear.

JK stands proudly in front of all this looking just a little bit smug, which she’s fully entitled to be given that she’s worth a mint. It’s strange to think that the people she’s inspired to be writers will one day be standing in front of their bookcases on the dust jackets of their own publications, possibly with a copy or two of her stories visible behind them.