Strewth, we don’t often find this sort of stuff in the review pile. Opening the package revealed a soft white cotton bag containing a slim, linen-covered hardback titled Intimate Stories: an anthology.

I checked the address to make sure it was right. And yes, this one was definitely intended to warm the cockles of our dusty literary hearts.

Closer inspection, once the kids were in bed, revealed that Intimate Stories is part of an ad campaign for Elle Macpherson Intimates underwear. It’s apparently a limited edition, although I can’t find any numerical reference to said limits - and in the UK, the Sunday Times is giving away 100 copies.

Intimate Stories is pretty slick: the work of Aussie ad agency The Glue Society, with the help of Auckland fashion photographer Regan Cameron. The 40-odd pages are punctuated by hyperreal softcore lingerie shots, each heralding a short story. We get Margate's most famous daughter, the reliably raunchy herpes sufferer Tracey Emin, ‘Anon’, Sir Elton John (I kid you not), Matt Ford, Sandra Bernhard and even the Antichrist himself, Damien Hirst:

I was in love with a girl once
who had breasts on her back

she wasn’t much to look at
but she was great to dance with

Nice one, Dames!

The layout of the book is a wee bit undercooked and the typography sucks harder than a Dyson, but let’s not be mean-minded here. It's great to see mainstream advertising take on a literary bent, and if we're talking lingerie, the prose may as well be purple.