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LRB blog

Read everywhere!

The Editors

It’s July, which means #readeverywhere is back. Enter our annual photo contest by taking a picture of yourself, or somebody else, reading the London Review of Books or the Paris Review in a scenic/dramatic/eccentric/perilous etc. setting, to be in with a chance of winning one of 30 expensive-smelling prizes from Aesop. Post your photograph on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook before the end of August, using the #readeverywhere hashtag (and don’t forget to tag us). We’ll be reposting our favourite entries throughout the summer, as well as reminders of the real point of #readeverywhere, which is that for two months only, you can subscribe to both the LRB and the Paris Review for one low price, anywhere in the world. (The offer unfortunately isn’t available to existing subscribers. We’re really sorry.)

It seems time to resolve an ambiguity in the hashtag: is ‘read’ in the past or the present tense? Is it an imperative or an adjective? After a heated, four-hour transatlantic conference call, we can confirm that it’s pronounced ‘reed’ rather than ‘red’, which is to say it’s very much in the present. So this year, we’re looking for evidence that entrants are actually reading the magazines in their photographs, not just holding up copies in front of their faces. This applies to baby and dog/cat/crab entries too. Last year’s winners won in part because we were confident that they were really engaging with the LRB and TPR, despite potentially distracting circumstances. We have it on good authority that the first prize-winner was deep into N.A.M. Rodger’s essay on submarines, the second prize-winner was reading Alison Jolly’s piece on primate behaviour, and one of the third prize-winners was considering his future in the light of Mark Greif’s profile of Walt Disney.

london review of books paris review

Comments

  • 3 July 2017 at 3:59pm
    Chris Larkin says:
    An interesting position, however I would have thought that one of the inescapable qualities of a photograph is its representation of something that has already happened and therefore 'red' everywhere seems far more appropriate. The necessary outcome of the competition is, surely, that it produces an ersatz archival record of the lengths people are willing to go to read the extraordinary articles in the LRB and TPR and as such should surely be pronounced as if in the past tense. If it were to be in the present the competition would have to take place over live streaming video - to capture the sense of immediacy and prove that people/cats/crabs really are engaging with the kind of veracity the hashtag, as posited above, demands. Despite being the 'final word' on the matter I for one think this trans-Atlantic call needs to be reconvened, post-haste.
  • 4 July 2017 at 12:23pm
    Renee Cohn says:
    Or perhaps we can agree that #readeverywhere is a hashtag that works on many levels: https://www.instagram.com/p/BLLfLMDjPG8/