The roots of this bookish postwar New York, as Denise Gigante shows in Book Madness, stretched back deep into the 19th century. Meanwhile, pioneering scholars like Barbara Tuchman, Frank Manuel and George Whalley mined gold year after year from the lodes of ore in the libraries. Many of the angelheaded hipsters whom I met busied themselves in learning Old Church Slavonic or translating Rimbaud. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the barrenness of American culture.
Edward Newton’s chatty books about his bookish adventures Holbrook Jackson’s erudite Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Every good secondhand bookshop offered guidance for neophytes: A. But it was still a city of books, collectors and readers. It lacked the quaint bookshops of Boston, where the staff seemed to know not only the books they sold but their 18th and 19th-century authors, not to mention Harvard’s Widener Library. New York couldn’t compete with London or Paris: it had no bouquinistes, no Farringdon Road, no British Library or Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Morgan Library, the New York Academy of Medicine and Columbia’s rare book collections served those with more specialised needs. When my father felt depressed, he would visit the print room and look at a Dürer. An untidy man who studied the racing form with equal care sat at the same varnished table, warmed by the same fading beams of the pale city sun. There I inched, pen in hand, through the huge folio volumes, bound in buckram, of the 18th-century edition of Erasmus’s complete works. In the reading room, battered but still grand, readers waited for their number to appear on the indicator – the library ran on steampunk systems, which supposedly included ‘pages’ on roller skates traversing the stacks at high speed. Schwarzman Building: a palace of the people on 42nd Street, traditionally known as the Main or Central Branch, with its encyclopedic holdings. Anyone over eighteen could explore the marble labyrinths of what is now called the Stephen A. New York Public Library branches were stuffed with new fiction and old treasures, which anyone could borrow or read. If you didn’t, you could explore the riches available in public collections. Higher-end bookshops offered incunabula and Aldines, first editions of Gibbon and Austen to discriminating buyers who had real money. At the dustiest and wildest of them all, Dauber and Pine on Fifth, one of the owners sold me a 17th-century Latin book on Druids that I couldn’t afford at half-price (‘rainy day special’, he explained). If you wanted rarities, you could browse the dusty, chaotic secondhand bookshops on Fourth Avenue and Broadway. You could pick up New Directions poets in the Village, Hebrew seforim in Brooklyn and German magazines in Yorkville. Rosenberg’s austere, packed shop on Broadway, where neither I nor another obsessive friend could afford $100 for a first edition of Winckelmann’s history of ancient art. You could buy new books in English at the elegant Scribner shop on Fifth Avenue, new books in French at the Librairie de France or Rizzoli, and old books in German at Mary S.
N ew York was a great book town in the 1960s.
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