I had asked Margery Blackman, who suggested it might be Anne Hollander. I'd seen the name on the internet and it rang a bell. After the column appeared Dr Jane Malthus emailed me: the writer was Hollander and the book was Seeing Through Clothes published c.1978.
The book I'd read was in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's library. Lynda Cullen, of DPAG, said it was not there now but she had a copy she offered to lend and she told me there was one in the university library.
I thank all these kind people.
When I consulted Wikipedia I discovered that Hollander died last year in New York aged 83. The article mentioned something I didn't: that in Seeing Through Clothes Hollander wrote ''It can be shown that the rendering of the nude in art usually derives from the current form in which the clothed figure is conceived.
''This correlation in turn demonstrates that both the perception and the self perception of nudity are dependent on a sense of clothing - and of clothing understood through the medium of a visual convention''.
''Thus all nudes in art since modern fashion began are wearing the ghosts of absent clothes - sometimes highly visible ghosts''.
She was indeed ''both erudite and original'' as Wikipedia says ''providing new perspectives on areas that previously had not been considered or had been regarded as unimportant''.
The Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival was on last week. This is a continuation of the New Zealand Writers Week, the first of which was organised by playwright Roger Hall and held here in 1989. It became a biennial event.
There was one last year so with this it has become, for the time being at least, an annual. There is a committee which organises it and perhaps a trust. This year's event hails Unesco's recognition of Dunedin as one its Creative Cities, specifically a City of Literature.
Although the festival officially started last Thursday, there were preceding events. On Tuesday, a new selection of Charles Brasch's poetry was launched at the Athenaeum.
On Wednesday, Philip Temple read excerpts from and talked about his dystopian novel MiStory, with questions from Neville Peat before the discussion was opened to the floor.
It is set in Dunedin later this century after adverse if not cataclysmic climate change where the landscape has altered, government is oppressive and surveillance is mandatory.
The brochure asked ''Is this prediction or fiction?''Temple's answer is it's a warning. He pointed out that George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 described a Britain which wasn't much like what the place was when the title year came round.
He didn't mention C. K. Stead's 1971 dystopian novel Smith's Dream. In that the hero goes to live in the Coromandel but an oil embargo produces an energy crisis leading to civil war and a guerrilla group is active near Smith's place, leading to his wrongful arrest.
Again, despite further embargoes and energy crises, we haven't quite come to that. In Temple's book there's a group trying to evade surveillance somewhere round Middlemarch, so the parallels are clear and Temple's novel seems a linear descendant.
It was a full house in the Clarkson Room at the Regent and many questioners expressed anxiety about anthropogenic climate change.
On Thursday, Daphne Clair de Jong, the current President of Honour of the New Zealand Society of Authors, delivered the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture.
This is usually delivered in Wellington but because of the Dunedin festival and Janet Frame's associations with Dunedin it was staged here this time.
Ms de Jong has written numerous romance novels under the pen names of Daphne Clair and Laurey Bright. The lecture was billed as an annual review of the state of writing in New Zealand.
Ms de Jong did comment on such matters although her address didn't really amount to a review. (She later said she'd lost some of her notes.) Instead she spoke at length and very interestingly about the development of romance novels.
She was concerned to defend the genre against claims it is light or ''rubbish'' or even bad for your mental health, which she did very ably.
She pointed out they aren't prescriptive but do deal with a question of fundamental importance, particularly for women, of choosing a male if she wants to have children.
There are perils that confront women as they do so which are all too often realised in life.
She's right. It's a serious subject and in the hands of the Brontes and Jane Austen, for example, has produced great works of literature.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
