Geoff Nicholson – författare

Though you might not encounter the subject in Artforum or stumble across it at Sotheby''s, the thriving business of erotica is a mixture of sophistication and seduction, an underground world of eccentric artists and serious collectors. In Sex Collectors, Geoff Nicholson hunts down an assortment of these obsessives around the world. From the Florida grandma with five million dollars'' worth of sexual collectibles to Third Eye Blind''s manager, who owns more than eighty thousand men''s magazines, Nicholson celebrates these collectors and the occasionally beautiful, frequently bizarre, and always fascinating objects they have amassed. He accompanies Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, as she is taken on a tour of a collection devoted to her. Days spent in the Kinsey archives reveal the cultural artifacts resulting from the sexual awakening of public America, as well as boxes with labels such as "Phallus with Agricultural Tools" and "Scarf Trick when Folded." Nicholson journeys to Germany to visit with the legendary Karl-Ludwig Leonhardt, sex collector extraordinaire of first edition volumes such as Flagellation pour couples pervertis and Tender Bottoms, erotic Picassos, and notes handwritten by the Marquis de Sade. Throughout his exploration of some of the wildest collections in the world, Nicholson''s discussion of collecting as an expression of self and psychology goes hand in hand with his gleeful discovery of the seventh giant phallus used in Stanley Kubrick''s A Clockwork Orange, Hitler''s creepily erotic personalized bookplate, and a woman who has a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix''s penis. Sex Collectors is a winning story of one man''s attempt to collect collectors, to reveal the neuroses that drive some people to collect, and to have good, dirty, high-minded fun while doing it.

Geoff Nicholson has been walking his whole life. Wherever he is and wherever he goes in the world, he walks and writes about what he sees and feels. Here he reflects on the nature of walking, why we do it, how it benefits us and, in some cases, how it can damage and even destroy us. His recent diagnosis with a rare, incurable form of cancer has made him all too aware of his own mortality. Sooner or later there will be a last step, a last excursion, a final drift, for him just as there will be for all of us.Geoff vows to continue to walk for as long as he can. This moving, vital book describes his own walks and relates them to the walks of street photographers, artists and writers, such as Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Sophie Calle, Jorge Luis Borges and Virginia Woolf, among many others. Walking on Thin Air is a book about mortality and, above all, a celebration of being alive.

The volunteer would complain, of course. I suppose he couldn’t help it. He felt angry or self-righteous or betrayed. He said this was not what he’d signed up for, this was breaking a promise, breaking the rules, this was not the way the good guys conducted themselves. He might say this was a violation of his human rights, a war crime, a crime anyway. And I’d say, “You’re probably right,” and then continued with the process. Joe’s got a lot to think about, and time on his hands to do it, since divorcing his wife and quitting his job training volunteers for a shadowy government agency. The otherwise nondescript house he’s just moved into boasts one key feature: a circular path in an overgrown backyard, on which Joe plans to walk twenty-five miles a day for a thousand days. Joe figures that walking the circumference of the Earth―safely on his own patch of territory ―might just be the thing he needs to move on with his life. But curious neighbors keep sharing their troubles and preoccupations, looping Joe into mundane intrigues, and unwittingly triggering Joe to use the unique problem-solving skills he learned on his old job. With the help of an aspiring bartender, who tests her experimental cocktail recipes as he walks, and philosophical advice from his mailman, Joe stays on pace despite the distractions. But it doesn’t matter how quickly he walks, the past is catching up to Joe, and for the first time, he must prepare himself (and not others) for the worst. A brilliant novel by a master storyteller, The Miranda is at turns a biting satire about the secrets we keep from our neighbors, and about the invisible and unceasing state of war in which most Westerners unconsciously live.