26 bookporn(s?),* 161 posts, 462 comments, 5,886 spam comments and 33,169 views later, AHC is one year old! thank you all for your support & feedback, and all the totally esoteric knowledge you’ve shared over the year — I’ve loved being in conversation with you & hope it will continue.
ok, 27 bookporn(s) — for who could resist a round library full of books on ‘The Orient’? I visited the Musee Guimet while I was in Paris this December, and it was full of marvellous displays of exquisite, stolen, I mean post-colonially appropriated, Asian treasures. But the library’s different. There’s a kind of hushed atmosphere when you walk in: the lights are dim and people shuffle about, struck silent with reverence, or perhaps the disconcerting, all-pervading pinkness of the walls and columns. The books lie, untouchable, behind their wire cages, and the smell of old paper lingers about well after you step, blinking, back out into the fluorescent glare of the exhibition outside.
* Having coined the word, the solemn responsibility falls upon me to determine how it shall be pluralized; I cannot decide if it should be ‘bookporns’, ‘booksporn’ or left as its unmarked plural form of ‘bookporn’.
If my opinion counts, it should unquestionably be invariable. One bookporn, many bookporn.
Booksporn looks like a fun word, though, has something of a ring…
I second “booksporn”! It sounds too much like “bookspawn” to let it be trumped by boring invariable plurals.
I went to the Musee Guimet when I was young, too young really. Your picture makes me want to go back, especially that first one. Sadly I now live in Nice =( Many thanks for your bookporn (however you pluralise it), I eagerly await each installment!
I think “bookporn” has to be pluralized like “porn,” aka “pornography,” which isn’t just an invariant, but a non-count noun, like “milk,” or “furniture” (rather than, say “sheep” or “deer”).
Thus, “many bookporn” doesn’t even work — the correct formulation would be “much bookporn.” Conversely, you wouldn’t say “fewer bookporn,” but “less bookporn.”
Now, a self-contained unit of pornography, whether a magazine or movie, can be called a “porno,” short for “pornographic ___.” So, if you were to publish a handful of magazines or videos of bookporn, you could call those “bookpornos.” But never “bookporns” or “booksporn.”
I think Tim thought it through a little to much but good luck with your studies and I love the pictures.
bookporn, because you don’t say porns. (but we do eat fried porns)
You could go Latin: bookpornae.
All I know is, I know it when I see it.