Scene: Lunch hour, one summer long ago. A forlorn young man, looking like a fugitive from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, sits alone on a bench in Bryant Park reading a Dostoyevesky novel. An adorable girl sitting on another bench and eating a sandwich notices him and approaches. “Dostoyevsky! You must be SO deep!” The young man blushes and stammers, “Well…” She places her hand over his, sending an electric charge through his body. She gazes at him raptly. “I’d love to get to know you. Let’s take the rest of the day off!”

I’m abashed, Dear Reader, to admit that that forlorn young man on the bench was your faithful blogger. And I’m even sadder to admit that that that romantic scenario never materialized. Lunch hour after lunch hour, Dostoyevsky novel after Dostoyevsky novel, I sat on a bench looking soulfully at girls and nurturing in vain the fantasy that they would notice my book and approach me. (Vain soul that I was, it never occurred to me to approach them.)

I’ve since learned that using book jackets as date-bait is a common ploy. Joanne Kaufman, writing in the New York Times, describes some instances:

“Michael Silverblatt, host of the weekly public radio show ‘Bookworm,’ uses the term ‘literary desire’ to describe the attraction that comes with seeing a stranger reading your favorite book or author. ‘When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person,’ he said.”

And…

“David Rosenthal, the executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, recalls the advent of Vintage paperbacks, a line of literary fiction that ‘could fit precisely into the pocket of your Levi’s with the title slowing, and it was an advertisement for what kind of intellectual you were.’”

Say goodbye to that pickup tactic. As the E-Book Era unfolds, you will never again be able to form an instant impression of a stranger from the book he or she is reading, or send a signal of your own. Why? Because, in Kaufman’s words, “for the purpose of sizing up a stranger from afar, perhaps the biggest problem with Kindle or its kin is the camouflage factor: when no one can tell what you’re reading, how can you make it clear that you’re poring over the new Lincoln biography as opposed to, say, ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’?” Kaufman describes the Kindle as “the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper.”

For her analysis of other ways that e-reading devices are affecting literary snobbism, read With Kindle, Can You Tell It’s Proust?

RC