From my viewpoint: Nora Roberts from head to toe

One of the continuing frustrations I have encountered in writing this column is the lack of freely available photographs of my subject. Nora Roberts herself does not include press photos on her website. Internet availability of photos of her that come with commercial use licenses is also limited.

Footwear photo by Arty Guerillas. Some rights reserved

I have been repeatedly indebted to Flickr user "devillibrarian" for the one head shot of Roberts on Flickr that has commercial use rights. Lately, though, I began to believe that, in my search for images, I had perhaps aimed too high. So I shifted my focus from "face" to "feet."

Roberts confessed in an April 12, 1999 People article to having a decided "weakness" for shoes. Surely, I thought, I could find photos somewhere showing her preferred footwear.

My efforts were rewarded on August 3, 2010 when Laura Reeth, Roberts' publicist, uploaded a series of pictures of the shoes Roberts wore at the 2010 conference of the Romance Writers of America onto Reeth's Flickr photostream. Reeth provided an explanation of the photos in an August 3, 2010 post to the ADWOFF message board in which she summarized Roberts' activities during the RWA conference.

Flickr allows for the embedding of slideshows of its users' photostreams. This means that Reeth's images can appear as if they are here even though they are actually still on Flickr.

So, thanks to all this technical wizardry, we get to see, in the first photo below, the Elizabeth and James shoes Roberts wore to her Friday, July 30 meetings; in the third, the Chanel shoes she wore while giving her keynote speech Thursday, July 29; in the fourth, the Manolo Blahniks she wore at the Wednesday, July 28 evening sessions; and in the fifth, her "Thursday morning shoes." 

I've already picked my favorite pair. What about you?