It's a library, but you can't touch the books

For a book nerd like me, The Morgan Library & Museum in New York's Murray Hill neighbourhood is an absolute delight.  This isn't a lending library, but rather it's a wonderful museum that contains the enormous and diverse book and manuscript collection of American financier, John Pierpont Morgan.

The man we've all come to know as J.P Morgan commissioned the construction of his private library in 1903 and it took architect Charles Follen McKim three years to complete it.  Built of pink Tennessee marble, in the Italian Renaissance style, the building was situated adjacent to Morgan's home and it was an imposing and impressive addition to Madison Avenue real estate.

For many years the building was simply known as "Mr Morgan's Library" but is now officially called "The Morgan Library & Museum".  It was designated a national historic landmark in 2006 and underwent a careful restoration in 2010, just before I arrived in New York and promptly fell in love with it.  Every time I visit, I still love being in JP Morgan's private study, then passing through the beautiful rotunda, before exploring the three-storey walnut shelving of the breathtaking East Room (the original library).

Aside from some beautiful items from JP Morgan's collection that are permanently on display, including one of three of his copies of the famous Gutenberg Bible, The Morgan Library & Museum also has temporary exhibitions throughout the year.  I did zero research on these today, knowing that whatever the Library had chosen to exhibit would be wonderful.  Indeed, I was particularly taken with the "From Gatsby to Garp" collection, and the beautiful "Marks of Genius: Treasures of the Bodleian Library" (which I was not allowed to photograph).

I have probably told you a couple of times that I judge a museum or art gallery by the quality of its gift shop, and I certainly feel that the Morgan Library Shop is one of the very best in New York City.  I never walk out of this place empty-handed and today was no exception.  I am now the proud owner of a delightful (if not slightly morbid) book entitled, "Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to New York City Area Cemeteries and their Residents", and a fantastic little deck of NYC trivia cards called "What Happened Here?".  But if you're looking for books for children, or some great desk calendars, or beautiful photography books, the Morgan Library Shop can provide.  You will not be disappointed.

I know it's not as good as the real thing, but please take a look at the photographs from today's visit.  I've done my best to put descriptions against each one, so you know what you're seeing:

Post by The ABCs of NYC.

Closing the chapter on New York book fans

The Javits Center - image credit here

After yesterday's fantastic launch event, I was really pumped for spending the day at BookCon.  I got up early and walked over to the Javits Center, which only took me about 20 minutes (if that) but when I got there a little after 9am, the lines were already out the door.

The first panel discussion on my wish-list didn't start until 10am so I headed for the main exhibition floor to look around.  Oh. My. God.  It was like Macy's on Christmas Eve in there.  People were going in all directions, grabbing fistfuls of free stuff off the display tables and not even taking the time to speak to the exhibitors, or to even see what they were grabbing.  As a friend suggested to me later, it was very reminiscent of the "Candy Man" scene in the original "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" movie, where the greedy kids basically loot the candy store.  I was Charlie Bucket.

Being so short, I couldn't see up ahead either, so I got stuck in human traffic jam after human traffic jam.  And everyone around me was carrying backpacks and tote bags that were getting steadily fuller, heavier, and more painful each time they slammed into my guts.  I spent all my time trying to navigate through the crowd and I literally did not stop - indeed, could not stop - at any of the display tables.  There wasn't any space to take the time and see what was on display, or ask the amazing array of exhibitors whether their books were old, new, free, for sale - nothing.

How I felt about my morning
Image credit here

Because of jumbled lines and pushy crowds, I realised afterwards that I even missed seeing Grumpy Cat - she was just on the other side of a growing crowd of people.  Sigh, maybe I'm showing my age but I just couldn't handle the confusing rush and even now, I'm feeling tense just reflecting on it.

Somehow I emerged back into the main foyer of the Javits Center, giant glass nightmare that it is.  Compounding the disastrous start to my day, Starbucks was the only coffee for sale and the line was almost out the door (though rather amusingly merging with the line-up for people trying to come in).  Don't even get me started on the lines for the restrooms.  I was on track from a 10am nervous breakdown.

The panel discussions were all being hosted downstairs where last night's launch had also been staged.  I found the room for the John Grisham & Carl Hiaasen panel and it was already bustling with people.  How many tickets had they sold for this BookCon thing?  Crazy.  I found a seat in the second-to-last row and relaxed a bit before the show got underway.

Grisham has a new book coming out in October, but this panel discussion was more a conversation between two authors about their writing process and the discipline required to churn out a well-researched and successful page-turner.  I have been a Grisham fan for a long time but up until today, I'd never heard him speak a single word.   I've never seen him on TV, or heard him give interviews, nothing.  But then that amazing southern drawl came out, and he talked about being a lawyer in Mississippi, and I could have listened to him for days.  One thing that has always struck me about Grisham's characters, particularly the lawyers, is that they always seem to start their workdays insanely early.  But that seems to be a throwback to Grisham's own professional life.  As he said this morning, he started writing A Time To Kill while he was practicing law, and every day he made the deal with himself that he'd get to the office at 5am, and he'd have to have his coffee and first word written by 5.30am.   He's slackened off that discipline now of course, but that was his routine for many years.

Grisham and Hiaasen (whose work I have not yet read) talked about the challenges of finding names for their characters - apparently obituaries and baby names books are popular sources.  They talked about the role of their wives and their editors in helping to "surgically remove" irrelevant plot lines or unnecessary characters from an unpublished manuscript.  And one thing I found really interesting is that in the past, they have both been involved in charity auctions where you can bid to have yourself written in to one of their books.  I had never heard of such a thing before.  Hiaasen learned the down side of this though, when a lady who won such an auction approached him 6 months later while he was at dinner with his wife, and demanded to know when they were going to start collaborating on his book about her.  Good grief, can you imagine?!

After the Grisham panel concluded I headed into the food court for a Diet Coke.  Of course, it was a cash-only enterprise, and when do I ever carry cash?  I asked the Javits Center employee whether there was an ATM on the premises and she looked at me like I was nuts.  Or maybe that was just her face.  If you want to see what hell looks like, Google the Javits Center during BookCon.

I was feeling rather defeated at this point, but I stood in line for the next panel discussion entitled "My First Novel: Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Writing, Publishing and Promoting a Book".  Unbeknownst to me, four separate queues for this event had started outside the room, and the BookCon staff began admitting the crowd line-by-line.  As luck would have it, I was actually standing in the first line to get into the room, so I scored a fantastic seat, with an uninterrupted view of the panel table.   As you can see from the photo, this discussion featured three young female authors (all debut novelists) and was facilitated by Rachel who works for Tumblr and who spoke so fast she should have had subtitles.  I really was old and grumpy today, can't you tell?

But one thing I really liked about this panel is that the lady you see on the left there is from Australia - her name is Courtney Collins and her first book "The Burial" has just been released in the US (but under the title "The Untold").  Apparently it has done very well in Australia and her attendance at BookCon today is part of an 8-city US tour to promote the book.  The panelist in the middle is Yelena Akhtiorskaya, whose book "Panic In A Suitcase" is officially released in bookstores on 31 July, and finally Celeste Ng who wrote a book called "Everything I Never Told You" which will be formally released this month.

I was particularly interested to hear what these women had to say about their experiences handing over their manuscripts to an editor and putting their faith in an agent, who would steer them through the murky world of publishing.  I liked what they had to say about the benefits (or not) of studying creative writing formally (such as a MFA at Columbia).  And I liked the reality check that these women gave me (and all of us) when they talked about just how long they'd been working on their books.  In Celeste's case, she had worked on 4 drafts over 6 years, and Courtney had written hers over 7 years.  I'd like to read all their books of course and even if I don't enjoy them (for whatever reason) at least I know that they worked really hard on them and to a large extent are still finding their feet in the industry.

We were supposed to all receive free copies of the books after this particular panel discussion, but of course all the vultures got to them first and I missed out.

As I wandered dejectedly over to the next panel discussion, it was also my time to stand in the wrong queue, so I couldn't get in to hear Cary Elwes talk about his new book, "As You Wish: Tales from the Princess Bride".  I was really frustrated about that, but there were so many other people turned away too, so misery definitely loved company.

I bravely made one more circuit of the still-crowded expo floor but strayed into the children's books section by mistake and that was way too perky for me.  I did pick up a sheet of stickers though, full of presumably famous characters from FarFaria.  I have no idea what that is, but I believe it's a free app you can download that teaches children how to read.  I could never be grumpy about kids learning how to read.

When I finally found the exit again, I took it as a sign to leave BookCon.  I walked away from the Javits Center and never looked back.  A sheet of stickers was my only free gift for going to the convention this year and although free stuff wasn't the prime motivation for me going, I have to admit I was disappointed that I didn't come home with at least a few new and exciting books to read.

But the Javits Center hasn't beaten me; I'm not giving up.  Perhaps next year I'll be able to scam an invitation to the industry days during the week, and take my time to peruse all the displays and actually talk to the exhibitors.  And I'll even bring cash for Diet Coke.  What a treat that will be!

Giving in to wanderlust

Photo Credit: Living in Neverland

I went on my first overseas holiday in 1995, as a chaperone for my sister's school trip to New Caledonia.  The idea of me being a chaperone for anyone is as humorous now as it was back then, but I remember the trip being amazing.  The girls in my sister's school group were as excited as I was to be away from home, seeing new sights and grappling with the challenge of applying our limited high school French to everyday situations.

When I got back to Australia after that brief time away, I knew that the travel bug had bitten me.  I wasn't working full time back then, so although my mind and body wanted to be elsewhere, my bank balance kept me grounded.

But it couldn't keep me out of the bookstores.

I became the most prolific armchair traveller you would ever find.  I think I single-handedly kept Lonely Planet in business back then, buying all the visitor guides for destinations I desperately wanted to see (Venice, Rome, Paris).  But I mixed those up with a diverse collection of travel books written by ordinary people who'd had extraordinary adventures in places I probably couldn't find on a map (Bhutan, Greenland, Madagascar).  Their stories taught me the difference between being a tourist and a traveller - and there was no question which one I wanted to be.

In conversation with my friend's great aunt, I learned the word peripatetic, describing a person who travels from place to place.  It gave an air of sophistication to the sort person I wanted to become.  My bookshelf groaned under the weight of journeys not yet taken, and I continued to work and save hard.

The obligatory week in Bali that seems such a right of passage for young Australians was a hedonistic affair.  But even then, I remember preferring the cool tranquility of temples over the gallons of 'jungle juice' and thumping music into the pre-dawn hours.  A month of intensive and immersive French study in Vichy, France left me lonely and sobbing in public phone boxes, regretting my decisions and desperate to come home.  The week-long Contiki tour through Italy afterwards put me back on track.

When my boss gave me permission to take a "gap year" in 2005, I all but put my hand on my heart and vowed to be back at my desk a year later.  As I stood there at my farewell party, colleagues told me "you'll never come back", "you've gone for good now" - and I swear, I didn't believe them.    But then you leave Australia in blistering summer heat, you transit through the cosmopolitan craziness of Hong Kong, you land in Paris where you see snow falling for the first time (outside of the ski resort), and your whole world changes.

Spurred along by that common thread of wanderlust than ran through all the travel stories I'd read at home, my adventure took me back to France, through Italy, Switzerland, Turkey, and finally to rest in Scotland for six months.

I've come to New York via all these places, plus Chicago, and London (stories for another time), so I know how it feels to be in a strange place, surrounded by unfamiliar language.  I'd like to think that I have an affinity with the streams of tourists that come through New York City every year, because even though I've been here for three years already, my tiny bookshelf still strains under the weight of New York travel books.  Photo guides and travel journals sit alongside history books which in turn prop up biographies of famous New Yorkers.  And even though the city is right outside my door, I can't stop reading about how others have experienced it.

Book 3 in the series

Innocent though they are in enabling this compulsion, the fantastic independent bookseller McNally Jackson is a must-visit when you come to New York.  Their mission is to celebrate Manhattan's literary culture - they want you to read about New York and get to know it better through its books and writers.  But of course they offer books from all over the world too.

But naturally I love the place because their travel book section is quite extensive, with maps and stories galore.  I grabbed a couple of titles yesterday including the third - and latest - "Have A NYC" book, an annual anthology of short stories about New York.  This third installment has been dedicated to the memory of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died in February this year.  I've already finished the book (of course) and while you won't learn any statistics or detailed history about New York from reading it, the book does give you a handle on the diversity of people in the City.  Its stories span the 1960s to present-day, and are set against the backdrop of neighbourhoods that, in many cases, have changed quite substantially over the years.  Whether you're an armchair traveller or an actual one, it's definitely worth keeping an eye out for this series.

Making space for an American literary legend

Dorothy Parker once said that she didn't care what people wrote about her, as long as it wasn't true.  Well even if I'd wanted to oblige her, I simply can't lie about my admiration for one of my favourite authors.

And I'm not alone in the esteem in which I hold Mrs Parker and her work, as evidenced by the full house for tonight's performance of "Dorothy Parker's Wicked Pen", at the mid-sized Symphony Space theatre on the Upper West Side.  We were treated to a great evening of readings and reflections on the mind of one of America's greatest wits.

Dorothy Parker was born in 1893 and grew up in New Jersey and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  After stints with Vanity Fair and Vogue, she started hanging out more frequently at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, with the writers who would eventually start The New Yorker.  Mrs Parker was on the magazine's founding board when it began in 1925, and she continued writing for them until 1957.

It's no secret that Mrs Parker was plagued by problems with men, money, and alcohol - all to varying degrees.  Ups and downs aside, what tonight's concert really drove home was that Dorothy Parker was a sharp writer.  Fragile maybe, and even a bit broken in parts, but she was popular amongst her friends and admired for her craft.  Case in point:

OBSERVATION
If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again.
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much;
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn. 

But I am always particularly impressed to know that Dorothy Parker was also a woman of firm convictions.  When she died in 1967, Mrs Parker left her literary estate to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and it is now held by the NAACP.

With introductions by writer and Time Out New York contributing editor Matt Love, tonight's performance featured talented actors reading excerpts from Dorothy Parker's magazine columns and prose.  Indie movie legend Parker Posey read "The Sexes"; Stage and screen actress Heather Burns read "Bohemia" and "In The Throes: The Precious Thoughts of an Author At Work";  Broadway veteran Mary Louise Wilson performed "From the Diary of  New York Lady" (my favourite - and it had the audience in stitches); and film actress Hope Davis closed the show with "The Standard of Living".  I wasn't familiar with any of these stories, but it was lovely to have them read by familiar actors.  They brought such animation to the work but delivered many of the lines in the dry, cynical way that you can just imagine Mrs Parker would have done.

Dorothy Parker American Gin

The New York Distilling Company was at the theatre tonight too.  They sweetened our theatre-going experience by mixing free drinks with Dorothy Parker American Gin.

Now normally I'm not a gin drinker, but the evening seemed to call for it, so I had a cool gin & tonic before the show started.  Very refreshing, and it has definitely tempted me to tour the distillery  in Brooklyn at some point in the not-too-distant future.  But when I do, I shall have another favourite Parker-ism foremost in my mind:

I like to drink a martini, two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table, after four I'm under my host.

A bookish exhibition, one hundred years in the making

New York has finally turned on the spring sunshine, and so by lunchtime I was ready to break out of my office and get some fresh air.

I left the Midtown rush behind and headed to the (much) quieter surrounds of the New York Society Library located on East 79th Street on the Upper East Side.  This wonderful slice of NYC history was founded 260 years ago, and has the distinction of being the oldest lending library in the City.

When it opened in 1754, the Library occupied space on the second floor of City Hall in Lower Manhattan.  The War for Independence in 1774 interrupted operations and some of the Library's collection had to be relocated to St Paul's Church for safe-keeping, but a lot of it was lost or destroyed.  By 1795 the Library had built up its collection to 10,000 titles and it relocated to bigger premises just off Wall Street.  Napoloeon visited the Library in 1837, and Charles Dickens followed suit in 1842, but by then the Library already counted some celebrities amongst its membership, including Herman Melville (author of Moby Dick) and Washington Irving (Legend of Sleepy Hollow).  A generous bequest from New York philanthropist Sarah Parker Goodhue in 1917 enabled the Library to purchase its current building on East 79th Street and its collection, and its membership database, continued to grow.

These days, the Library has about 3,000 members and a collection of over 300,000 volumes.  In return for paying their annual dues, Library members can access the gorgeous reading rooms, a children's library, a vast catalogue of electronic resources, and an impressive calendar of events throughout the year.

Most of the library is off-limits to non members (which is totally fair enough), but fortunately non-members like me are still allowed to visit the exhibition gallery.  And so it was that on my lunch break today I browsed the NY Society Library's latest exhibit , "From The Western Front and Beyond: The Writings of World War One". 

The small exhibition has been timed to commemorate the 100th annivesary of  what we know as "The Great War".  According to the little postcard I pinched from the from the front desk, the exhibition seeks to share some of "the writings and literature that came from the trenches and bloodstained battlefields".  The books and poetry anthologies on display were collected by Frank Bigelow, who was the New York Society Library's Head Librarian from 1895-1937.  Clearly Bigelow had his finger on the pulse at the time of the Great War, and he recognised the great social change the world was undergoing.  Bigelow immediately began padding out the Library's collection with books that had been written during and just after the war, and an assortment of these works is presented in the display cases around the exhibition.

I saw beautifully-maintained copies of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Gallipoli by John Masefield, as well as poetry anthologies by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon (all of which I had studied at high school).  Other works were less familiar to me, including Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb (adapted into a film in 1957 starring Kirk Douglas), and Her Privates We by Australian author Frederic Manning, which is said to be the first book to have emerged from the First World War.  

I was really pleased I got the chance to see this collection of works about what author Vera Brittain called "the depleted generation".  I was equally impressed to learn that once the exhibition wraps up on 15 November, the books will be put back in circulation for the lucky Library members to borrow.