If you want people to know you have a cold, ostentatiously blow your nose; but if you are feeling pretentious, something I sometimes feel, it’s not so easy to signal.
One way is to buy any book by Georges Perec and leave it lying around as if in mid-read. I have never read anything of his, even in translation (pretentious, yes) but I do know of two of his books.
“Perec is noted for his constrained writing. His 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written with natural sentence structure and correct grammar, but using only words that do not contain the letter “e”. It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter “e” is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.” (Wikipedia)
Yesterday I saw a new sculpture, it would be hard to miss, in Kensington Gardens near the Serpentine Gallery.
Should you wish to make this at home save up a lot of cardboard egg boxes.
I do have a copy of a novel by George Perec, which is perhaps 5% read, but is neatly shelved. I fear that leaving it out would not impress anyone, for we seldom entertain, and after 34 years of marriage my wife’s evaluation of me is pretty well settled.
Once long ago, she used a copy of The Critique of Pure Reason as a stopper to keep the doors of a china cabinet from swinging open. In the course of the evening, I saw an undergraduate of about 19 showing it to a graduate student a bit older. The latter said, “Well, a real scholar would be reading it in German.” So it might be my luck to have a visitor pick up Life: An Instruction Manual and say, “Well, a truly literate reader would have the French edition.”