Lessons from the Stacks: How To Read A Person Like A Book
This week's Lessons from the Stacks come from Gerard Nierenberg's How To Read A Person Like A Book, a 1971 study of body language. The library's copy has been heavily annotated by a later scholar, who has drawn explanatory details (which is to say, blood) on the illustrations, thus:



The annotater has also written "Warning! Sexist material inside!" on the title page, perhaps in reference to lines like "the conscious throat-clearing sound made by an adult male can be a nonverbal signal for a child or female to behave", or to this handy anecdote:

A friend of ours used to get good-looking girls to sit next to him on cross-country bus trips by taking an aisle seat — since he had observed that women like to sit by the window — placing a pillow on the window seat, then gesturing his willingness to remove the pillow every time a good-looking girl walked down the aisle looking for a seat. Giving up his territorial rights won him an enviable number of attractive companions.

I don't really understand why it's an intrinsically good thing to be sitting next to someone pretty on the bus, but maybe the "friend" also ate a lot of crisps and lard so that the girls had to touch his legs to get past him to the seat. On the whole, though, the book's not so much sexist as zoological, dealing with women as a new and fascinating species:

Women, when expressing sincere feelings to other women, do not shake hands. They gently hold the other's hands in theirs and with congruous facial expressions communicate their deep sympathy. Often an embrace that endorses their attitude will follow. Very seldom will a woman use this gesture with a man. It seems to be specially reserved for communication with her own sex.

Additionally, women are believed to "hear" airborne sound with their antennae, using hair-like sensors at the tips; and a woman who happens upon a new food source will return to the nest, repeatedly touching the ground with the tip of her abdomen, producing a chemical trail. When she meets with her nestmates the excited woman will harass them by knocking against them and touching antennae, which causes other women to follow her trail back to the food source.

To be fair, Nierenberg does this sort of alien-observation thing to everyone, not just women: "Clergymen, lawyers and academics tend to steeple often, as do business executives. Our research data indicates that the more important an executive feels he is, the higher he will hold his hands while steepling." This is why particularly self-important business-men have been known to start belly-dancing casually during tense negotiations, sometimes on top of a small stepladder.

After a little practice, Nierenberg suggests, interpreting people's gestures becomes easy, particularly if you're willing to experiment:

The delicate balancing of a shoe on the toe of one of the feet tells a man, "You're making me feel comfortable in your presence." Should you want to test this, the next time a woman performs this gesture, say or do something you think will make her apprehensive or uncomfortable and notice how quickly she puts her shoe on.

and to observe:



As with the other books I've examined, How To Read A Person Like A Book includes exercises to test how you're going — in this case, some pictures of women that you're supposed to look at, with instructions "without reading the captions, try to determine the nonverbal communication of each of the five girls whom you might see at a typical social gathering". I've included three of these five, with the captions blurred, so you won't be tempted to cheat:



Now that you know how to read body language, be careful not to abuse the power! I can give no advice sounder than the very last paragraphs of the book itself: