I was 20 and a visiting scholar in Japanese Studies at Harvard when I saw the notice in the window of the Coop: Andy Warhol was coming to sign his first book, Popism. Incredulous, I marked the date and time.
“I have to do this,” I told my boyfriend on the appointed day.
“Wait, I’m going with you,” he said, and together we walked the three blocks up Brattle Street to the Coop. Already the line snaked down the alley between the old building and the new one, and for about forty minutes we inched forward until Warhol was in sight. A woman, perhaps his co-author Pat Hackett, sat beside him, but only Warhol was signing. He was fast at it, inscribing one purple book after another from the huge pile beside him.
My expectations were minimal: a quick autograph and on to the next customer. I didn’t expect Warhol to speak, but after I said hi he did.
“What’s your name?”
“Hope.”
“Hi, Hope. I’m Andy,” he said. Then with a black marker he signed my book twice: once on the cover and once on the frontispiece. I thanked him, and then the next person stepped up.
This took no more than a minute, yet I remember it vividly. Warhol was not so shy that he didn’t ask my name, yet unlike any adult I had met (or any child over the age of ten), he seemed to have none of the armor everyone else acquires long before adulthood. Though he was the center of attention, Warhol appeared frail and palpably vulnerable. Seeing him was like encountering a turtle with no shell: an unimaginable surprise.
“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” Warhol said, or didn’t say. Whatever the source, this famous maxim is truer now than it was when it was first attributed to him in the 1960s. Less well-known is my corollary: that countless people have encountered Warhol, but only for a minute.
In the decades since, I’ve moved across the country and down the California coast with my copy of Popism. In each place the book has been a favorite possession, and a reminder not only of Warhol’s time but my own.