FOL Finds: The Sexy (Not Really) Edition

At my local Friends of the Library, we don’t get terribly unusual donations. But it is springtime, which means we’ll be getting hundreds of boxes, bags, and totes—sometimes in a single week. It gets overwhelming and we don’t know how we’ll store everything until the monthly book sale. After the worrying, we start rifling through and shelving the deliveries, and I get to “read” part of someone’s life story.

Now, we do get books that deal with intimate matters, but they’re more along the lines of sexual health and education. But the themes are varied. How to talk to your kids about sex. Intimacy from a Christian perspective. Nurture your inner fertility goddess. An erotica book in the middle of Amish romance and Nora Roberts hoards. A very gently used copy of Shades of Grey. Nothing that would turn heads in this day and age.

Except for the load I’m about to describe.

The donations in this recent delivery were explicit.

Black and white photographs of full frontal nudity. Male in position 1 and female in position 2 so the reader can follow along. “We stripped each other and made love on the picnic blanket where anyone could see us.” An artistically blurred, grainy photo featuring top-down view of a woman guiding a penis towards her opened legs. Tomes promising to reveal secrets of mind-blowing sex but are regurgitated material from every other book on the market.

It’s the kind of material that would have streamers and their chats squealing with teenage glee, using every known juvenile euphemism for body parts—demonstrating how their minds and imaginations haven’t progressed beyond twelve years old, while also betraying how little sexual experience they actually have. As a married woman of over a decade, this stuff hardly impressed me… but it did amuse me on some level.

To be fair to the original owner, the collection was comprised of more than just smut. There were a few Penthouse anthologies in all seven boxes, but the intimate material made up most of the load, telling a rather graphic story about how this woman (I just know it had to be a woman) approached sex and relationships.

This person had bought sex manuals, the aforementioned anthologies, and even a disturbing book on how to get started in the swinging scene. All this either to supplement their love life or in preparation for one. Sensing the absolute desperation emanating from the entire collection, I had to guess the latter was more likely. But by God, they were raring to manifest the sex life of their dreams.

Because not only was this person eagerly looking for love, they would do anything to get it—anything but perhaps actually socializing with potential partners. They consulted books on crystals, chakra exercises, hoodoo, candles, and witchcraft. There was even a book on palmistry, a subject I never understood even when it was explained to me. But now I remember back in high school when a classmate, a tenderhearted male goth, read my palm. He saw my life line and said that I was going to have a hard time of it. That did turn out to be true, so maybe there’s something to the art after all.

Then again, those three small lines never resulted in the three children the universe allegedly guaranteed me. So…

Getting back to the donations. Of course I had to skim a few titles, like The Everything Sex Signs Book. Did you know that Taureans don’t care much for butts or breasts/chests but fixate on necks? I didn’t, and I’m obviously not in the position to do research. But if I ever befriend one well enough to ask… you know what? I probably still wouldn’t ask. Not because I’m a prude, but because I have more respect for others than a Twitch chat full of dysfunctionally aroused virgins and incels.

I had to read up on Cancers. Yeah, there’s the whole homebody thing, and how we hide in our “shells” when we’re hurt, and sometimes we’re hurt enough to swear revenge (and, from personal experience, sometimes we’re successful in exacting it).

But I absolutely do not agree with the vaguely incestuous notion that we get turned on by scents that remind us of our parents. Nor do I believe that we get kinky when we’re surrounded by childhood toys. If the latter were true, I couldn’t walk or think straight while I’m in the Virginia Beach Antique Mall. If nostalgia were a turnon for me, I’d be watching every Nostalgia Critic episode with a glass of wine and a Hitachi Wand… but knowing the internet, there are people who do that. I hope I haven’t crossed paths with them.

The cookbooks were less surprising, but I saw a sharp trend. They began with entertaining guests and dining for two. Later titles included “eat yourself thin” and diabetic cooking. Lots and lots of diabetic cooking.

Typically when we get donations of this size, the person who owned them is no longer alive. A lot of these books originated in the 80s and 90s, so maybe their owner had a few decades to find the companion they so dearly wanted.

I like to think so, because the incomplete fragments I have of their life story are silly and sad all at once. It’s a testament to how society trains us to fall in love and become obsessed with sex and orgasms… while utterly failing at teaching us how to have true, lasting companionship.

Love can be incredibly hard to figure out, and even harder for some to find. But life teaches hard lessons. Even if you do find love, it doesn’t necessarily mean happily ever after… and it doesn’t always remain as love.

If she didn’t find love, I hope Ms. Manifest at least found some comfort in her life.

On a lighter note, I left the towers of books on the main workbench with a message advising the president and her husband to decide what to do with them. That was two weeks ago.

On my next visit, there was no trace of them. Nothing on the self-help shelf, nothing in the family section, nothing misshelved in fiction or young adult. (You’d be surprised how little cognizance some Friends posses. I once spotted World War Z in the military/history section.)

I didn’t think to look in the giant trash bin we use to toss out books that are damaged or unfit for sale (outdated political titles frequently find themselves here). But since they were nowhere to be found in the room, I can only guess where they might have turned up… and the less I ponder about that, the better. Some things about acquaintances are best left private.