76. A blind date with a book

Deciding what to read with only the slightest hint to go on. Plus – the solution to last week's puzzle!

Jun 17, 2023

Dear Reader,

Having completed a photography assignment in the area the day before, we recently found ourselves with a day to spare in Cambridge. After a reasonable night’s sleep on a super campsite we had some tasks to accomplish in town.

Only here for the solution to last Saturday’s ‘Hidden Roman Treasure’ puzzle?
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Scroll down – I’ll see you at the bottom of the page!

Leaving our campervan to socialise with its fellow VWs we found a bus to take us into town for just £2 each – a fraction of any of the local car park rates – and once it had deposited us in the centre of Cambridge we started working through our list.

One of us1 had noticed the previous evening that it was low tide for wine in the van’s fridge, so a quick trip to the off-licence would be on the cards later.

After a fun morning in which multiple shopping missions had been accomplished we granted each other carte blanche to pop into whichever shops took our fancy. While Jim got itchy feet in the direction of the Apple Store, I wondered if I might find a nice second-hand summer skirt in the Oxfam charity shop we were passing. I dived in.

It quickly became obvious that I’d only read the sign above the shop, not looked properly at the window display.

‘Oh, it’s just books!’ I told Jim. He said he’d wait outside.

Reader, I didn’t need any books. Besides, I’d briefed Jim that my latest mission was for a summer skirt, not books – so as much as I enjoy second-hand book shopping when I am second-hand book shopping, today I didn’t want to spend time giving every single volume my full attention while I weighed up whether to buy it or not. Heck, I still had wine to buy and a bus to catch.

And then I saw this:

The books were in an assortment of sizes and thicknesses; some were hardback, some paperback. And they all looked the same. Now, we know not to judge a book by its cover – and it’s not for nothing that that idiom is in our everyday vocabulary, warning us not to judge someone or something based only on appearances – but shopping for a book without being able to see its cover was something totally new to me.

The pattern on the paper wrapping was unattractive but familiar, and it took me a while to realise that it was actually gift wrap used the wrong way round.
(A very clever choice of common denominator when you’re looking to anonymise something.)

In their wrapped state, the blind date books that were up for selection by potential suitors were clearly lacking what in online dating circles is called ‘the profile pic’. So how was I going to choose? Well, by using their written dating profile!

Each book in this neatly-wrapped selection in very plain, uniform packaging sported a handwritten word on its spine:

POEMS
THRILLER
FICTION
BIOGRAPHY
CHILDREN’S

I took several of the wrapped books off the shelf, and found there were more words written on the front of each wrapper.

I read things like:

BLACK COMEDY
FANTASY
MILITARY FICTION
SCI-FI ADVENTURE
WELL-KNOWN CLASSIC

These keywords weren’t giving much away – the descriptions were sparse to say the least – but I found myself narrowing down the selection to only thrillers. Which one should I choose?

POLITICAL THRILLER
SPY ADVENTURE
CLASSIC CRIME
COLD WAR THRILLER

And, perhaps most alarmingly:

RELIGIOUS MURDER

With the feeling that the last choice would be pushing things rather too far, I picked up the book marked ‘POLITICAL THRILLER/MYSTERY’, wondering whether it would be as good a read as anything else of that genre I’d already read. My brain suddenly took me back to the sort of thing I’d read in my late teens, when I’d enjoyed watching the brilliant 1990 TV mini-series of Jeffrey Archer’s mystery thriller ‘Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less’ and gobbled up Dad’s copy of the book very soon afterwards. I’d been similarly glued to the pages of political thriller ‘House of Cards’ by Michael Dobbs, again straight after I’d seen its UK TV adaptation2.

Well, if this date in disguise was going to be as good as either of those, I thought, I’d be reading happily ever after.

At the till, realising I had no cash on me – not even the single pound required to make my purchase – I swiped my phone against the card reader. ‘I must get used to using cash again!’ I told the lady behind the counter, followed by ‘This is such a good idea, the mystery book thing. I love it!’

‘Oh, lots of people do it’, she replied, ‘Not just charity shops. Have a look online – they’re all over eBay and Etsy. All kinds of places!’

I reddened. How had I never come across a blind date with a book before? 🤔

I popped my pound’s worth of parcelled pages into my bag, and found Jim leaning against the building opposite.

I bounded across the road. ‘Guess what? I’ve PULLED!3’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘I’ve got a date! With a book! THIS book!’ I fished it back out of my bag and brandished it in his face.

‘What book even is it?’

‘Ah!’ I grinned at him. ‘That’s exactly the point!’

After Jim’s promised visit to the Apple Store, a trip to the off-licence to pick up a bottle of Sauvignon blanc, and a hot and airless bus ride back to the campsite, we stowed our shopping wherever we could make it fit, my blind date book being tucked carefully into the locker beside the van’s sink.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Jim asked. ‘You could read it with your glass of wine.’

Reader, I wasn’t ready. I felt awkward, even under pressure from my anonymous book, and the run-up to this blind date was suddenly feeling like the anxious anticipation of a meeting with any other potential suitor – a hearty mess of confidence-crushing panic.

What if it’s not right for me?
What if we’re not a good fit?
How ‘thrilling’ is this thriller going to be? Is it even going to thrill me at all?

The solid ground of confidence that we’d be perfect for each other crumbled before me, the resulting chasm threatening to swallow me up in a dodgy romcom plot twist.

This book: my blind date. Would it better for both of us if I just jilted it?

No. I had placed my confidence in the person who had categorised the book in those very few words, and needed to trust them in what they’d picked for their ideal reader of ‘POLITICAL THRILLERS/MYSTERIES’.

On our arrival home from our trip, my blind date book still wrapped up, I passed the bookcase on our landing as I schlepped our assortment of van luggage upstairs.

This one- and two-word or phrase idea to describe a book had piqued my interest, so as soon as I’d unpacked, I plucked four of my favourite reads down from the shelves.

If I were selling these as ‘blind date books’, how would I categorise them? The text on the wrapping in the Cambridge bookshop had been so sparse, so minimal, as to give me almost no idea of what sort of words would be revealed from beneath the paper.

I had a go at writing similarly skimpy dating profiles for my four books:

Spine text: Classic travelogue
Cover text: Boys’ trip, humour
(‘Three Men in a Boat’ by Jerome K Jerome)

Spine text: Children’s
Cover text: Funny, engaging fantasy
(‘Rebecca’s World’ by Terry Nation)

Spine text: Memoir
Cover text: Life-enriching, transformative, hiking
(‘Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found’ by Cheryl Strayed)

Spine text: Classic fiction
Cover text: Funny, feel-good, coming-of-age
(‘I Capture the Castle’ by Dodie Smith)

Were these words enough, though? Or even the right ones? Would they have been sufficient to get my attention if I were shopping blind for a book? Might I be setting myself – or others – up for dating disappointment? Gosh. This experiment was getting harder.

With so few words, this approach felt like the book-lover’s equivalent of speed-dating! Perhaps I needed to maximise Oxfam’s minimal approach into more of a fleshed-out internet-dating profile in order to give our literary love interest rather more in the way of description.

I remembered what the lady in the shop had told me about Etsy. Popping my books back onto their respective shelves, I opened up my laptop and entered ‘book blind date’ into the platform’s search box.

Many of the books I found listed offered me more than the sort of bare crumbs that had been on Oxfam’s plate. Their descriptions were more expansive, the information more tailored towards the buyer wanting their blind date to really suit them. I wondered, though, whether if the books I saw in Cambridge had as much information as this, it would have narrowed down my choices too far. Maybe when it comes to keeping an open mind, less data is actually more? 🤔

Now, I don’t know the actual titles of the books in the Etsy examples below, but the words used to describe them certainly got my attention.

A library-style tag on one of the Etsy books I saw read as follows:

Thriller, Adventure
Printed in 1967
A rain-swept night
an old comrade
Man-hunt across Europe
Two loyalties
235 pages
3.71 GoodReads

Now this I can engage with. It’s nice to know both the date of publication and number of pages. Its rating on GoodReads doesn’t put me off, and aside from the two words ‘Thriller, Adventure’ to denote the genre, the eleven words used to describe the book have pricked my interest.

Let’s try another, this one with a seven-word description:

Crime, Murder
Printed in 1978
Handsome photographer mysteriously disappears
Many female admirers
203 pages
4.03 GoodReads

Again, pretty tempting.

Reader, how many words do we need in order to have enough information to pick the right blind date book? Is there even a right answer? Or indeed will it ever be the right book for us?

🤔

Well, it’s time to open my blind date book. What will be revealed beneath the wrapping marked ‘POLITICAL THRILLER/MYSTERY’?

Well, those three words turned out to have been exactly right, as I found when I tore open the inside-out wrapping paper to reveal my blind date’s title:

HOUSE OF CARDS

🥳

Seriously. 😁

I wonder – in the real-life world of choosing a date based on a limited written-word profile – how many words are really necessary?

Eleven words
‘Young-looking 42 male, GSOH, dog person, IT entrepreneur, craft beer aficionado’

Seven words
‘Foodie, enjoys the finer things in life’

Three words
‘Tall, dark, handsome’

Reader, for me the three-word profile is absolutely spot on. With books or otherwise, in the dating game it’s nice to be kept guessing. After all, finding out too soon what is hidden beneath the wrapping might be all it takes for the whole house of cards to come tumbling down.

Love,

Rebecca

Have you ever had a blind date with a book? Did you live happily ever after, or did it leave you wanting? Let me know in the comments!

Dear Reader, I'm lost

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