A selection of short essays on the apparently trivial objects and rituals of post-war French life.

There's wrestling, steak and chips, toys, soap powders, wine, striptease, the Citroën, ornamental cookery, advertising, popular photography, bourgeois theatre, and so on. Barthes' argument is not that these things are secretly “deep” in the tedious undergraduate way, but that everyday culture is already doing ideological work before anyone has had the decency to admit it.

The famous second part, “Myth Today,” sets out the machinery behind the essays: myth as a system of meaning that takes historical, political, and social arrangements and makes them look natural. A steak is not just a steak; a magazine cover is not just a magazine cover; a wrestling match is not just a wrestling match. Culture quietly launders power through common sense. Still one of the cleanest entry points into semiotics, media theory, cultural criticism, and the suspicion that nothing innocent has ever survived contact with advertising.

Paladin / Grafton paperback, 1987 reprint of the 1973 Paladin edition; selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers. Good second-hand condition with visible age-toning, cover creasing and general shelf wear; internally readable and intact.