What the Cover Promised

I’ll be honest: I bought it because of the cover. A naked woman smoking a joint—that’s the whole pitch, and it worked on me completely. Do You Read Me?!, the excellent Berlin bookshop for people who select books by their covers and will happily cop to it.

Contact High is Richard Kern’s book—photographs of women getting high and taking their clothes off, which sounds reductive until you’re actually holding it. What he manages to pack into a single frame is a specific atmosphere: a particular late-youth hedonism that existed before smartphones turned everything into content. The smoke drifts across the pages like evidence. There’s something documentary in it that the nudity alone doesn’t explain.

Around €25 for the trip. Worth every cent.