Every publication is finally judged by its contributors, so here are ours: fourteen women, each met in person before her first byline, each photographed by us in our own rooms, each described in sentences we are willing to repeat at your door.
Fourteen is the size of a masthead, not a directory, and the smallness is deliberate. It means we can tell you from memory how Michelle paces a midnight hour, why regulars ask for Danielle by district as much as by name, and which of the fourteen to send when a message says only that the week has been long. Geography favours you too: Molly writes from Centrum, Danielle and Lea from the Jordaan, Luna, Rosa and Angelika from De Pijp, Margo and Nora from Oud-Zuid, Michelle and Stacy near Leidseplein, Milena and Patricia by Dam Square, Nancy and Vanessa down at Zuidas. Wherever the city has put you tonight, one of them is nearer than you think.
Each profile prints the verifiable facts, age, height, languages, the district she sets out from, and beneath them a few lines of ours about how she actually works. The photographs are plates, not promises: taken by this house, of the woman who will arrive, in the condition she will arrive in. What no page can typeset is temperament, so ask us for it. Say you want the quiet one, the wry one, the one who talks easily through the first ten minutes and then lets the room go silent, and the answer comes back as a name.
Decided readers send a name, an address and an hour, and learn within minutes whether she is free. Undecided ones send the shape of the evening instead, the chapter, the length, the mood, and let the house cast it, which is the part of this work we are proudest of. Neither message costs anything, and neither binds you until a woman is actually standing at your door.
