Tour

Literary New York City

By Nicole Pasulka

New York is a book lover’s paradise – if you know where to look.

A New York City subway car during rush hour can look deceptively like a library’s reading room. And even in December, vendors turn the city’s sidewalks into bookstores, hawking paperback copies of Moby Dick and Gravity’s Rainbow. Celebrated in poetry and prose, home to more than its share of the global literati and still the reigning publishing capital of the world, New York is a book lover’s town. So instead of warming up with a book and a blanket at home this winter, grab your Kindle and hit the Big Apple lit trail.

The Times in the hotel lobby is fine for checking out the box scores on any other visit, but literary tourism requires a home base with slightly more canonical offerings. Manhattan’s Library Hotel has 60 rooms organized according to the Dewey system. Reserve a deluxe fifth-floor (Science) room stocked with paleontology titles or bone up on your Sanskrit in a junior suite on the fourth floor (Language). Cicero was onto something when he wrote, “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”

Once you plow through your room’s catalogue, the Morgan Library and Museum and the New York Public Library are both a short walk from the hotel. December is a big month at these literary behemoths. At the New York Public Library, the Lenox copy of the Gutenberg Bible is on display 150 years after it first came to the U.S., and until January 3, the Morgan is exhibiting over 100 of William Blake’s original watercolours, prints and illuminated books of poetry.

For those who prefer buying to borrowing, Argosy on 59th Street proves that brilliant, independently owned bookstores are still thriving in New York City. But for a slightly more specialized shopping experience, the Brooklyn neighbourhood Dumbo is home to storefronts for independent publishers powerHouse Books and Melville House. An inspiring example of local microindustry, the Melville House staff are secreted away behind the shop’s revolving bookshelves.

Back in Manhattan, tour guide Joyce Gold knows Greenwich Village like her own bookshelf. On Dec 13, she’ll tour the Village touchstones of bohemian and literary life in New York City, passing the home where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women and the site of the Provincetown Playhouse where Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugene O’Neill were original players.

If imagining you’re Henry James strolling through Washington Square Park with Edith Wharton makes you thirsty, stop by the White Horse Tavern on 7th Avenue for a cocktail at the bar where Dylan Thomas had his last drink. Later, provided you can still see straight, a book lover’s tour of New York City wouldn’t be complete without readings. On December 2 at the Cornelia Street Café, Free Range, a non-fiction reading series “where the authors are permitted to write, read, and roam freely instead of being contained in any manner” will feature playwright and poet Nick Flynn. And Michael Idov and other contributors to the book-in-progress Made In Russia: Undersung Icons of Soviet Design will brave the elements to read at – where else? – the KGB Bar in the East Village on December 6.

Reading may be the perfect indoor activity for a cold winter night, but this December it will lure New York City locals and visitors outside and into each other’s company, giving new meaning to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s optimistic quote: “No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books. ”

(Nicole Pasulka is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in Salon, The Globe and Mail, CBC Arts Online and Bust Magazine.)

TOP IMAGE: Elvert Barnes
MORGAN HOUSE: Gilbert Court. Photo by Michel Denancé.
GREENWICH VILLAGE: Courtesy Joyce Gold Tours