Bookstores
When I was little I didn't know what a bookstore was, being only familiar with libraries. When my family was on vacation in Door County, a good six hour drive from my home, we went to a bookstore and my parents bought me a Babar book. We were getting ready to go home and we were taking the book with us. I was so confused. I was so worried about how we'd get it back to the "library" on time, being convinced that no one could own a book outright. The revelation that you could have books that you kept obviously changed my life. So therefore I will now present to you "libraries" where you get to keep the books!
If you're anything like me you can't be content just looking at sights when visiting a new city, you need to add to your bookshelf. Not only is it a new world to explore locked between a front and back cover, but it is a souvenir of your time away from home. I know this need to own more books is a condition that is almost worthy of professional help, but I've decided to embrace it, because it's not like I have any other vices! New York has one of the most famous bookstores in the world, The Strand. Located a few blocks northeast of Washington Square Park at 828 Broadway, on the corner of Broadway and East 12th Street is this hallowed bookstore.
The Strand literally boasts miles and miles of books.While I personally have no way to confirm or deny the exact mileage of the books being eighteen, I can guess it is pretty accurate. The first time I saw The Strand I was down at Union Square Park and my friend Orelia and I were hungry and we wandered into a restaurant that happened to be right across the street from the bookstore. I don't know what reason prevented me from going in, but it wasn't until later that year when I returned to New York that I finally made the pilgrimage.
What I remember most about The Strand is that on entering there was this lovely pillar and around it was where they displayed their more reasonably priced collector's edition. Needless to say I kind of hovered there and this is where most of my purchases were made. Signed editions of books, like Alistair Cooke's autobiography, which was actually a present for my father, made their way into my shopping cart. And yes, I do remember where I bought books almost a decade ago, don't you?
The thing you have to realize on going into The Strand is that you are going into a maze. Plan ahead, bring provisions (aka lists of books you're looking for) or you might easily be overwhelmed. I am very lucky in that Madison is a veritable book haven, with amazing used stores such as Frugal Muse. This means that I have very high standards in my bookstores. Aside from the collector's section I was actually a little underwhelmed by the store. Perhaps this is more because I didn't find any of the rare books I often hunt for. One hopes upon going to the mecca of bookstores that you will find that one book you can never find anywhere else, but alas it wasn't to be. Yet a used bookstore isn't entirely to blame for this. They are at the mercy of what people bring in to sell. So I blame the New Yorkers who hold onto all their cool books and don't let bookish tourists like me get them for their own collections!
The most interesting thing I found at The Strand was their rare book room. Having the room isn't strange, this is one of the biggest bookstores in the world, what I found strange was the rules. I had to check all my belongings, sign a waiver that if I did anything to any book I would pay for it. I was so scared at this point that I basically walked around the upper room with my hands tightly behind my back for fear of damaging something. The room felt too much like a library where you knew the librarian would never let you check out a book no matter how sweetly you asked, and yes, I had one such librarian at my grade school growing up, and yes, she was a nun, a very scary nun. As for the books on display on various tables? Traps to lure you into staying! Seeing as at this time I was applying for grad school I couldn't afford anything there, in fact even if I won the lottery I probably couldn't afford anything there, so I calmly backed out, made my more reasonable purchases and moved a few doors down to the comic shop, and yes, they do have a Forbidden Planet in New York!
If you think that the store itself might be too tempting or overwhelming, or dare I say, too Downtown (note to self, stop typing Downton), there's a stall for you! The Strand operates a book kiosk on 5th Avenue on the Central Park side across from The Pierre Hotel (which has an awesome afternoon tea FYI, get their house blend and don't be afraid to ask for more sandwiches). So for those feint of heart or those easily tempted, make your way to 5th Avenue and East 60th Street, open 10AM to Dusk, weather permitting of course. But don't forget, that The Strand is just one of many bookstores, and I mean many. I had planned on checking out a great many of these, but, alas, it wasn't to be. But the joy of New York is just stumbling on a store and walking in, you can find the best places this way, places you never knew existed. Of course if you are more organized, as I obviously am to a psychotic degree, just google New York Bookstores and you will get an amazing array of places throughout the city, places that I hope you and me will one day visit.
The wonderful thing about New York, aside from an amazing literary history that can be found in the haunts of all the authors that have walked the streets of this thriving metropolis, is that the city has amazing institutes where the works of these great authors are housed. I'm talking about libraries folks! Now, because you are just visiting New York do not think this rules out libraries. Yes, you do have to live there and have a library card to check out books, but that doesn't mean you can't check out the buildings (and the gift shops)! New York City has some of the most beautiful and iconic libraries in the world. Of course there are the more functional and drab libraries, but the main branch, it is truly worthy of it's title as the third largest library in the world. The great edifice is located at 5th Avenue and West 42nd Street, where it is guarded over by Patience and Fortitude, the great lions that any bibliophile should recognize, have they been to New York or not, I mean just look at this month's themed banner. 
But you know what the best part about libraries is? Unlike almost every other location I have mentioned you get to enter and not stand outside imagining what the interior is like! Though I bet the lions would keep you company if you were to remain outside. The entrance hall is that worthy of a grand mansion. While the main hall doesn't have that much natural light, the candelabras give you a sense of entering another world. The hush throughout the building is uncanny. The first time I went to this library it was bucketing down outside and despite being soaking wet and having squeaky shoes I was compelled to walk silently, no matter how hard that feat was. 
One thing I do regret about my visit was that I was a little too worried to disturb others to look at some of the amazing reading rooms. If you are quiet and polite, I don't think anyone is going to mind. This is the Rose Main Reading Room. This room is almost two city blocks long and brilliant murals line the ceiling of the most heavenly of skies. Here too you are walking in the steps of great authors. Norman Mailer, Elizabeth Bishop, and E.L. Doctorow have all worked under this painted sky. 
What I love most about this edifice is that this kind of detail and grandeur is usually more associated with seats of government, like my State Capital, yet here it is all for knowledge and books! This ceiling is the McGraw Rotunda (though ironically rectangular in shape). Edward Laning did this amazing series of murals as part of the WPA initiative. The concept is The Story of the Recorded Word, from Moses descending with the ten commandments, to Gutenberg showing his famous bible. But overhead Prometheus brings to mankind fire and knowledge stolen from the gods, for which he would be eternally punished. But it still makes a great mural!
The holy grail among libraries in New York though has to be the Morgan Library. The Morgan Library is located at 225 Madison Avenue, between East 36th and 37th Street. This was originally built as the private library of J.P. Morgan, but is now a museum. This is the number one place I want to visit in New York. For the span of years in which I was more frequently visiting New York the library was closed due to a huge renovation project, but thankfully it is now open. What I find amazing is just the number of original manuscripts housed here. Manuscripts that you would think would be elsewhere, like three Gutenberg Bibles, Shelley's notebook, Balzac's works! But then it never does to have preconceptions of where things should be, I should know better then to think Shelley's notebook is somewhere in Italy where he tragically died, after all, who would think all of Tolkien's manuscripts are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin? And yes, I have seen them.
I love looking at the "Old Tyme" pictures in black and white before the restoration. This is the library as it was when Doctorow wrote about it in Ragtime. There is something that makes me think of Citizen Kane with the large and opulent fireplace and just the piles and piles of books. At least they are stored nicer then in all those crates in Xanadu.
But what do I really think when I see pictures of this library? Well, my opinion is twofold. One is, OMG the Library from Beauty and the Beast is real. Two is, why won't someone give me a library like this? I mean, in all seriousness, I don't have to have all the original manuscripts, I mean that would be nice... but just to have a place like this? Dream come true! I could easily fit all my books in there and have room for tons more! Like literally, the books could weigh a ton and I'd still have enough space!
And if ever the main room was too opulent and I wanted to slum it a little, there's the "Red Room." All Victorian and lush. Why aren't we building libraries like this anymore? Yes, I know that there are still beautiful libraries being built, but none have that steeped in feeling of history and the gravitas of these two examples. And the best part? These are but two examples! New York has so many other libraries to explore you could spend your entire trip there just going from library to library. Sneaking into the Cooper Hewitt not to see the Design Museum but to go to the gift shop which used to be Andrew Carnegie's library that overlooked Central Park. Little gems like this are out there for you to find and I hope that one day you get the chance to find them!
When one thinks of old New York and the literary scene you can't help but instantly think of Edith Wharton. Wharton was a writer of great note, she was not only repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence. Friends with many of the literary elite of the day, she was able to combine her insider's view of America's privileged classes with her own insights to create works with depth and a social and psychological conscience. Her books captured New York at the turning of the last century for all readers. What better way to step into the past then to pick up The Age of Innocence and be lost in the doomed affair of Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska? But what is truly amazing about New York is that there are pockets within the city that have barely changed in a hundred years. There are houses and parks that remain just as they are, like they are trapped in a little time bubble. It is just as easy to get lost on a side street and end up in Wharton's world as it is to turn the pages of a book.
Washington Square Park was the epicenter of literature and wealth at the end of the 1800s, before everyone fled uptown. Being in the heart of Greenwich Village, it is still a center for culture, only a little less affluent. Aside from a lack of gallows, this park located at the end of 5th Avenue could easily be the same as it was when Wharton looked out her windows. A few years back when I was visiting New York I was in search of the old city and was on my way to the 
Anyway, back to Washington Square. While yes, the arch does dominate the scene, I found myself entranced by the luscious red brick buildings that surround the park. Of course it was one of these buildings that Wharton lived in. Before leaving the city of her birth and building The Mount up in Massachusetts, she lived at 7 Washington Square North. As Wharton sat in her house she could look out and see Robert Lewis Stevenson talking to Mark Twain, as they met there in 1888. Many artists from the Hudson River School might have dropped by the park to paint it. At the nearby Hotel Albert, 23 East 10th Street, three blocks away from the park on the corner of University Place and East 10th Street, everyone from Walt Whitman to William Faulkner were mingling. Wharton had the cream of the literary crop always a moment away. 
There is a feeling in the park that I can't describe, an old and a new coming together to form that ineffable feeling that is what makes New York so unique and indescribable all at the same time. This painting captures for me that feeling in a way my words will always fail. Looking at this gorgeous painting Wharton's house would be that building on the right of the arc. She was there. She was in the center of it all. She is, in my mind, what true Literary New York is and always will be.
Truman Capote is known more for his celebrity then for his writing, causing almost as much controversy and discussion with his author photographs and lifestyle choices as with his prose. Which is in some aspects fair, he was quite a character in his own right and never hid his homosexuality in a bigoted era, and he knew how to get publicity, much like the aspiring artist Andy Warhol who greatly admired him; but also in other aspects not quite just, because Capote was a magnificent writer and his celebrity often eclipsed his written work. Before he was even ten he moved to New York with his family and would forever belong to the city. In fact at 19 he already had a job working as a copyboy at The New Yorker (an institution that will feature prominently in the lives of many of the authors profiled this month). Getting his start publishing short stories in many magazines, including the aforementioned New Yorker, brought him to the attention of publishers, in particular Random House, and his first novel was begun. 
Capote dabbled in everything from Broadway to films, while touring the Soviet Union with a production of Porgy and Bess he wrote what would become his first non-fiction book, a genre that he would be renowned for when he wrote In Cold Blood in 1965. But the work that captured everyone was his novella Breakfast a Tiffany's. As George Costanza learned to his dismay, while popularized by the 1961 movie with Audrey Hepburn, the original story written in 1958 is far different. But just because they differ doesn't mean that you can't still relive either or both as you wander through New York. 
The iconic store and storefront still remain, located just two blocks south of Central Park East at 727 5th Avenue at the corner of West 57th Street and 5th Avenue. I will be interested if you get up the nerve to go in, I never have. Oddly enough most people miss the store. The reason for this is that Trump Tower does loom over the old structure quite alarmingly. Those gaudy gold colored letters spelling out Trump's domain is redolent of the eighties, as is the whole structure. But when looking at the greedy monstrosity, just shift your gaze a little to the left and there is Tiffany and Co. I knew this one girl who went to New York (not me in "disguise," but actually someone else) and was so sad she had missed getting "breakfast" at Tiffany's, and as she was showing me her pictures I said, but you got the edge of the building. I showed her that in her picture of Trump Tower, that shift to beautiful pink stone was where she had wanted to go all along and missed. A sad realization to make once you're already back in Wisconsin.
Yet Manhattan Island isn't the only place where you can stalk the great writer now long gone. Literally just over the Brooklyn bridge is his old residence. Capote said he "live[d] in Brooklyn. By choice." Who wouldn't want to live in this house at 70 Willow Street between Orange Street and Pineapple Street? Besides the wonderful street names the lemony colored house looks spacious and inviting, though I don't expect anyone I know would be able to afford the price tag. Capote's house recently sold for $14 million. But that is the joy of walking in Literary New York and the surrounding areas, you can gawk for free and let Capote's haunting words wash over you: “I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it."
Originally I was thinking of calling September's theme month "Autumn in New York." But then sense weighed in saying, while yes, September is the month autumn starts, I was technically going to be in New York in August, not autumn (plus the one time I was in New York in autumn, it wasn't very autumny)... plus, well, I shall never name a theme month after a lame Richard Gere movie, and that is my promise to you! So this theme month started when I was planning my trip to New York for this past summer. I was looking up all the places I wanted to go, ie, stalking long dead author's haunts, and inspiration struck! Instead of just doing this for fun, I could do it for my blog, which, technically means I was doing it for fun because that's what this blog is to me, besides a labor of love. But then I ended up not going to New York, long sad story, I've moved on; yet despite the trip being defunct now, I couldn't give up on this idea of "Literary New York" (which I had finally settled on as the name of the theme month). So I decided that I'd use this as more extensive planning for when I finally get back to New York, which will happen despite the fact that it appears that like The Doctor I am timelocked from the city. 
