New York is a book lover’s city. Just west of the magnificent public library on Fifth Avenue, which I once breathlessly described in this column, is Bryant Park. The park hosts film screenings, piano concerts and a statue of Gertrude Stein looking rather like a vegetable seller on Usman Road. But its best feature is an outdoor reading room, an arrangement of tables and chairs shaded by umbrellas under a double row of sycamores. On the day before July 4, a young woman dressed as a cat plucked a guitar and sang songs to children. Then patriotic songs were piped in. At one table, a mother read the story of the town mouse and the country mouse to her marvellously attentive toddler, and I set down my tomato soup on the next table over.
From the papers, magazines, children’s books, classics, and novels stacked on carts everywhere, I picked one novel and settled in while sparrows pecked for crumbs at my feet. Rules of Civility , by Amor Towles, was not a proper edition but bound, uncorrected advance proofs stained here and there with someone else’s soup. The story opens in the 1960s at an exhibition of Walker Evans’s subway portraits. Evans, a renowned chronicler of families struggling through America’s last Great Depression, took candid shots of subway riders between 1938 and 1941 and waited decades before displaying them, out of respect for his subjects. I had seen those same portraits a few weeks ago at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, weary, wary faces of people wearing hats, broad collars and the veil of solitude peculiar to New Yorkers.
The coincidence effectively distracted me from the book. The mother next to me was now reading about a bunny, and her boy, who seemed to prefer the classics, wandered off.
At the library itself there was an exhibit about lunch, showing a handful of the 45,000 menu the library holds. The exhibit also displayed images of undernourished children and a copy of Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives , which launched subsidised lunches for American schoolchildren in the early 20th Century. A copy of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) was opened to the definition of “lunch”. Webster’s dictionary was there too (1841), the man’s own copy, printed only on the recto pages. On the verso pages were annotations in his handwriting.
Far north of the library stands the Grolier Club, established in the late 1800s by a small group of bibliophiles. We can’t go into their stacks, of course, but the club has public exhibitions. This summer it is exhibiting letters and papers belonging to Aaron Burr, surely the only Vice-President of the United States accused of treason and murder. I looked dutifully at the educational display, but what delighted me was a 1789 map of New York. It gave me the feeling of having poked around in an old trunk and discovered something on my own. And that feeling, too, I owe to my fellow bibliophiles.
