A beloved paperback is a visual diary, every worn spot a memory of it being held, tucked into a bag, tossed onto the backseat of a car, or squeezed between other volumes on a shelf. Through Personal Paperback, Bisbee photographer John Charley explores books as objects, letting us see individual copies of paperbacks at larger-than-life scale to reveal the ties between individual people and the texts they love.

Photo credit: Detail from “Allison Williams’s copy of 50 Poems” by John Charley, 2017.