The Pretty Women of Paris is an extraordinary idea. The two extracts online are entertaining enough, but I assume they’re a concoction of the woman who claims to have found an original copy on her boyfriend’s bookshelves. Fiction masquerading as history. However I think the illustrations are out of sync with the writing… a tad too pretty! Early porn photographs are robustly anatomical. The women in them are real and often quite fleshy, their clothes grimy, hard-worn and greasy at the seams. The writing on show in the extracts… the first one particularly, could have done with something less fey than the hippy-chick prettiness of the accompanying drawing.

Kathe, I haven’t heard anyone use the word ‘gander’ to denote ‘look’ since my father died! You made me smile reading that!