My Alibris passion now is for buying a certain kind of home-decorating book of the 1970s. I found three books from Quick Fox press at a local used bookstore, and the next morning bought every other decorating work in the Quick Fox oeuvre, because:
* these are real people's houses from the 1970s
* they are not styled

Before I worked in this job I had no idea about stylists. I figured the art director went to the photo shoot, she and the photographer put everything how they liked it, and then they took the picture. No! There's a third party, almost always a freelancer, who is on the shoot, who probably brought most of the stuff to the shoot, and who totally determines the look of the shot. On house shoots nowadays, stylists bring kitchen goods, shelves of fake books, bed linens.

These 1970s houses are conspicuously not styled. They've been cleaned, usually, but no one went in and added new products that didn't belong to the homeowners, in order to make the house look hipper. The photos are also not retouched in any way. So it's eye-opening to me after looking at so many superperfect images in modern magazines.

I know if I showed these books to other people who work with m, it would be a huge effort for them to get past the ugliness of a lot of the rooms in the books. You can't argue that they're not ugly. They are.