How Marilyn Monroe perfected the art of the shelfie

Head bowed, mouth open, Marilyn Monroe reads her book. Ulysses and Aphrodite, hugger-mugger in a Long Island park, the siren in a candy-stripe one-piece, sitting on a roundabout, dandling James Joyce’s novel on her knees.

The photo was taken by Eve Arnold, causing as many ripples today as it did in 1955. English author Jeanette Winterson swooned at “the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book.” Or was she, wonders German biographer, Stefan Bollman: “The question, ‘did she or didn’t she?’, is almost unavoidable.” Was Marilyn pretending to read? And what does pretending to read even look like?

Nowadays, we’d call such an image a “shelfie”, and plenty of A-listers have tried this novel approach. At the height of Buffy fame, Sarah Michelle Gellar was snapped on set enrapt in American Psycho, just as boxer Mike Tyson was caught swotting Kierkegaard. Stunts or real moments? Why not both? At times, books can be radical, fashionable, their presence as much a statement as their sentences.

Thanks to history, books can generate a sacred vibe. Prior to 1500, the pamphlet-like incunabula (literally cradles) held sway, and later the illuminated scripture of baroque monks. Nor has that aura dimmed, as Emma Smith observes in her fine tribute to bookhood, Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers (Penguin, 2023).

A Shakespeare scholar at Oxford, Smith has swum in books, from her Asterix omnibus of childhood to Ben Denzer’s 20 Slices of Meat, a 2020 book made of thread, glue and mortadella. Since “bookness” is tricky to define, muddied by the Kindle wave, seeing spines succumb to screens. “Books as content, rather than form,” as Smith remarks, the “etherised text” all the while emulating the book experience.

Portable Magic, a Stephen King epithet for books, explores bibliomania and bibliomancy (divination by books), bibliocide (burning of books) and blooks (book-looking objects). We meet banned books, the bullet-holed Bibles and books in paintings. We skim marginalia. Learn how literary annuals, popular among middle-class women in the 1820s, gave rise to Christmas presents, as well as the eventual abolition of American slavery, with calls for social reform spread via the guise of giftware.

Tim Winton calls books “tickets to elsewhere”, echoed by poet Emily Dickinson who reminds us, “There is no Frigate like a Book/ To take us Lands away.” Woolf or whodunit, whatever your fix, books allow us to imagine a world otherwise.

Even Amazon’s progress gauge, where authors are paid according to how far a reader travels within a certain ebook, was foreseen by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1817). Getting meta before meta was a thing, Austen writes, “The anxiety [about marital conclusion] can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the telltale compression of pages before them, that we are all hastening to perfect felicity.”

Leading us back to Marilyn on her roundabout, spellbound in Joyce. Proportionally, the book is 99 per cent read, the volume open at Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. If you haven’t read Ulysses, or even pretended to read it, you may not know the final sentence is 4391 words long, culminating (spoiler alert) in one big breathless surrender: “…and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” And that’s what Marilyn is reading, allegedly.

No wonder the world is still in love with the image. And books.

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