Lost in the mists of tome

The Hollywood Book Club Steven Rea

Chronicle Books

There’s James Dean, perfect hair and a smirk — cigarette in one hand, The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley in the other. Audrey Hepburn, a classics connoisseur, is cross-legged on a shag carpet, eyes fixed on the open book in front of her. And Orson Welles is supine, smoking a pipe and focused on a weathered copy of A History of Technology, Vol. III: From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution.

Stars, they’re just like us! Provided you consume your reading material while draped in a silk robe and posed seductively.

In The Hollywood Book Club, photo archivist Steven Rea curates 55 photographs of classic film stars “with literature (or not), in their hands

— or on their laps, or in the general vicinity.” The full-page images are black and white, and they’re stunning: Rita Hayworth and Ginger Rogers are otherworldly; 25-year-old Marlon Brando’s gaze is so smouldering, one worries about the flammable book he’s holding. Each photo is accompanied by just a few lines of text, a simplicity that keeps the focus where it belongs: on the images.

Rea groups the photos into categories, including the stars luxuriating in their personal libraries; reading to their kids; studying source material for film interpretations; and passing time on set.

An eclectic taste in reading is apparently timeless: Sammy Davis

Jr. relaxes with a paperback edition of Lloyd C. Douglas’s biblical epic The Robe, and Lauren Bacall peruses a pictorial history of 20th-century conflict. John Cassavetes and

Gena Rowlands read Baby Animals, a picture book by Garth Williams, to their son, Nick, who grew up to be an actor and a director.

Some were notably voracious readers. In a 1951 photo, Marilyn Monroe is curled up on a sofa bed, wearing a silk bathrobe and sultry expression while reading The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine. Books are stacked on every nearby surface, too — Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flats.

Bette Davis’s reading habits became the subject of national attention in 1938, when The New York Times reported that her husband wanted a divorce because she read “to an unnecessary degree.” Her fellow stars, one imagines, would disagree.

The Washington Post