GEOFF NICHOLSON

Geoff Nicholson has been walking his whole life. Wherever he is and wherever he goes in the world, he walks and writes about what he sees and feels. Here he reflects on the nature of walking, why we do it, how it benefits us and, in some cases, how it can damage and even destroy us. Geoffs recent diagnosis with a rare, incurable form of cancer has made him all too aware of his own mortality. Sooner or later there will be a last step, a last excursion, a final drift, for him just as there will be for all of us. Geoff vows to continue to walk for as long as he can.This moving, vital book describes his own walks and relates them to the walks of street photographers, artists and writers, such as Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Sophie Calle, Jorge Luis Borges and Virginia Woolf, among many others. Walking on Thin Air is a book about mortality and, above all, a celebration of being alive.

Though you might not encounter the subject in Artforum or stumble across it at Sothebys, the thriving business of erotica is a mixture of sophistication and seduction, an underground world of eccentric artists and serious collectors. In Sex Collectors, Geoff Nicholson hunts down an assortment of these obsessives around the world. From the Florida grandma with five million dollars worth of sexual collectibles to Third Eye Blinds manager, who owns more than eighty thousand mens magazines, Nicholson celebrates these collectors and the occasionally beautiful, frequently bizarre, and always fascinating objects they have amassed. He accompanies Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, as she is taken on a tour of a collection devoted to her. Days spent in the Kinsey archives reveal the cultural artifacts resulting from the sexual awakening of public America, as well as boxes with labels such as "Phallus with Agricultural Tools" and "Scarf Trick when Folded." Nicholson journeys to Germany to visit with the legendary Karl-Ludwig Leonhardt, sex collector extraordinaire of first edition volumes such as Flagellation pour couples pervertis and Tender Bottoms, erotic Picassos, and notes handwritten by the Marquis de Sade. Throughout his exploration of some of the wildest collections in the world, Nicholsons discussion of collecting as an expression of self and psychology goes hand in hand with his gleeful discovery of the seventh giant phallus used in Stanley Kubricks A Clockwork Orange, Hitlers creepily erotic personalized bookplate, and a woman who has a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrixs penis. Sex Collectors is a winning story of one mans attempt to collect collectors, to reveal the neuroses that drive some people to collect, and to have good, dirty, high-minded fun while doing it.