Three books

The three volumes are recent French novels in the cheap yellow paper covers that Paris publishers were turning out by the thousand, and the titles can be made out. One is Émile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames, about a vast new department store swallowing the small shops around it. The other two are by Edmond de Goncourt and Jean Richepin. Van Gogh read enormously and argued about these writers in his letters, drawn to the way they took ordinary modern life without dressing it up. The odd shape of the picture belongs to 1887 as well. It is oval because the support is the lid of a Japanese tea box, and Japanese goods were reaching Paris shops in quantity just then. He kept coming back to piles of books that year, ending with a tabletop carrying 22 of them and a glass of pink roses.