Red or Read, they both sound the same to me.
Early on the saturday morning (my time) the posting announcing the mandate
appeared, and I immediately got to thinking of what to post. The thought
occurred to post an archive shot of some old tractors I saw the previous
weekend at a heritage festival, but thought I'd better do something
original. Things like flowers, red cars etc popped into my mind but I
thought them a bit too cliched, plus I wanted to do it in B&W. So saturday
afternoon I was off driving around and saw in front of a church a slogan
that was something along the lines of "The best bible is the read bible",
and suddenly it clicked - I'd take a photo of a bible. Well my old bible
didn't look real photogenic, so decided to go up to the local library to see
what they had. The ones for loan again looked pretty dull, then the thought
hit me - red/read - something by Marx, Tung, Stalin etc - the library drew
blanks, and since I wanted to do the shot in B&W a red book wouldn't really
have impact. The wife got out The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and we
headed home. When she got home, she plonked them down on the table where
they sat for a couple of days. A couple of days later she started nagging me
about wanting her camera back (I had it loaded with B&W), so I headed out to
the park to finish the roll. Got home with still one shot left, saw the
books on the table, cleared away the other junk that had accumulated around
them and snapped away.
In retrospect, I probably should have just left them with the junk around
them - it would have had more of a "better off read" impact.