#1

Ivan Peter Shaw used to own books. One of them was about Charles X. After his death, his books were without an owner.
So what usually happens to orphan books happened. They were given to charity.

Ivan Peter Shaw was likely to be an accountant or a banker or in another situation that involves counting papers and numbers, dreading the negative sign and associating the colour red to a defect or a financial gaudiness, a sufferance shared by plenty, in silence.

But Ivan was unhappy.

Before he passed away, he used to love his books. His books were kept safe and he would forbid anyone to read them. He was also applying this to himself, allowing himself to only ten minutes of reading per night.
But every night.

How could a man of numbers be blamed for dreading to get muddled with letters? He, who was a mathematical mind, had nightmares involving Latin words written with Greek letters and whole books written without the vowel e.
He merely regarded Dostoevsky's work as an untidy alphabet.
His fear of lexical disorderliness became addictive.
Secretly, so he would not meet any opposition, he initiated a complete revision of the words order in the world literature according to his primal sense of calm and order. A gargantuan task that consumed his nights and challenged his own stability.

He gave up on the second week, facing a cruel reality. Power. Or the lack of it. He had power over the words but not over what was behind the words.
He understood that disorder was simply order without power.
This left him bewildered.

He was speechless and could not find the right words in order to get help, from eminent doctors and librarians or psychophonists.
Let alone the writers.

He researched every book he had that touched a bit of medicine, science or addictions knowledge, consulting journals and even an old addictionary, a collection of all the most absurd addictions that his great uncle brought back from Madagascar. He did not find a single reference to his misery.
Hopeless he grew. He could not find the answer and each time he felt he might have been close to putting his finger onto something relevant, it would be time to close the book, the ten minutes being up. His rare condition affected his perception of the words and gradually led him to mistrust them, more and more. He felt provoked by their strength and power and did not want to accept their authority.

In 1924 a friend of his wrote to him, a letter, on a Blick typewriter. I say Blick because the person who wrote the letter mentioned it in the letter.
He was grateful that Ivan advised him to take a two weeks vacation in the Cotswold and was speaking highly about the cottage he stayed in. He mentioned the name of a woman, whom most likely had also taken part in this vacation. The details made about the relation between the friend and this woman was very 1920's.
He wrote a whole paragraph to ask Ivan a favour.
He was asking him four hundred pounds. He gave a lot of details about how he would refund and at what rate of interest.

He could not stop reading the letter, as it only took him two minutes and twenty-six seconds to read it.
But the letter came to an end so he did.

In the post scriptum, there was this curious annotation:
'Please refer to Die Schoenheit des weiblichen Koerpers'

The nature of this book intrigued him. Also, he could not see why his friend, after having asked him to borrow some money, would then advise him to consult a book on the beauty of the feminine body.

This book had been written by a man of medicine from Stuttgart, called Dr. C. H. Stratz and a copy of it was sitting still on the shelf of a bookshop in Croydon.
He visited the bookshop one rainy afternoon and found the book. And decided to read through the book. For ten minutes.
As he opened the book to read through, he found himself looking at a picture of a young girl for a bit longer than he thought was acceptable. He reprimanded himself but that was not enough to blot out the silhouette that was now drawn onto his mind.
Ivan Peter Shaw was a kind of man who spend most of his life hiding behind a curtain of good manners. He knew he would not return home with such a book in his possession. He had to keep a good image of himself in front of his wife and his children. But he also knew he wanted that book to be his.

He turned around to see if someone was watching him and after judging it being the right moment, he tore the page and tucked it in his pocket.
He felt content but also corrupted by the power of this page and the caption he read at the bottom of it.
He left the bookshop feeling a bit like a strawberry thief.

He kept it secret all these years.
He hid it in a book he had on Charles X. Along with the letter his friend sent him. He concealed all evidence of the very existence of his knowledge about that book and about Dr Stratz.

I happened to find that book on Charles X.
When I opened it, it was there. The picture and the letter.
That day, I had just put a new film in my camera. I was in a charity shop looking for a hat or maybe a lemon juicer.

I saw the picture that had been there for more than forty years. I put it on the floor. I took a picture of it myself, in black and white.

B.