Few things can make fandom seem like pathology as fast as collecting celebrity memorabilia. Having one of Paul Newman's race cars? Awesome. Having a Newman-O you stole straight from his mouth? Maybe not so much. The more likely you could use it to clone someone, the creepier it is. Thankfully, books fall well within the safe zone—and thanks to an auction starting today, you can even use your love of a particular celeb to help others.
San Francisco-based conceptual artist Josh Greene has been asking famous people to send him personal copies of a meaningful book—something from their shelves they'd find difficult to part with. Somewhat surprisingly, people have been willing and eager to send in their favorite reads. The haul, part of a project Greene calls Read By Famous, includes books from Jon Stewart, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Francis Ford Coppola, Douglas Rushkoff, and basketball legend Isiah Thomas.
Now that Greene has pulled together nearly 100 books, many signed and inscribed by the celebrity reader, he's selling them off on the Read By Famous website—and will donate all the money he makes to nonprofits Literacy for Incarcerated Teens, African Library Project, and Room to Read.
But how do you get the likes of Maggie Gyllenhaal to just send you one of her prized possessions? "It’s a lot of not thinking too much about it, and being willing to send an email to someone you went to junior high school with," Greene says. Granted, being from LA, Greene has a slightly different network than most: Henry Winkler (AKA Fonzie from Happy Days and Jean-Ralphio's dad on Parks and Rec) was a classmate's stepdad, and Douglas Rushkoff was his SAT tutor.
Growing up in the vicinity of celebrity hasn't completely dimmed its shine for Greene, though. "I think at once it’s possible to be kind of mystified and demystified," he says.
And that's kind of the point of the project. If you were to buy Jon Stewart's copy of Why Soccer Matters by Brazilian soccer star Pelé, you're buying it because Jon Stewart probably touched it. (In this particular case, you can be sure of it: the copy is the one that was on the Daily Show set while Stewart was interviewing Pelé.) But a book is, as Greene notes, a "humble" object—it reminds you that Stewart is underneath a normal guy with a normal life.
Obviously, if you buy one of the books, you're paying a premium for that reminder. Greene may handle the books with white linen gloves, but the more roughly the celeb handled it, the more you'll pay. The profiles of each book on the website catalogue evidence of wear—on the corners, the book jacket, the spine—not unlike how a barista might tell you about all the notes you should be tasting in your single-estate pourover.
Greene hopes that these imperfections will bring a human moment to the project. "There's something in the notion of sharing something physical," he says. "Now that we’re doing so much sharing digitally."
But more than anything else, it's the thought and care these books represent that make this project special in a world where you can actually buy celebrity DNA encased in a necklace. "It's not just like, 'Oh, these were my tube socks that you found combing through my dumpster,'" Greene says. “There's some intention—and a bit of a window into their thinking."
