A literary travelogue to New York, by Michael Dirda

Instead, I remembered that an previous D.C. good friend now lived in Queens and truly had a visitor bed room.

I typically take the bus to New York however this time managed to discover a fairly priced ticket on Amtrak. As typical, I waffled for an hour over what to learn en route, lastly deciding on Lawrence Block’s just-published “The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown,” an surprising however welcome late outing for Bernie Rhodenbarr, antiquarian bookseller, genial first-person narrator {and professional} thief.

I used to be solely midway by Block’s novel — at 84, this beguiling storyteller has misplaced none of his aptitude — when my practice rolled into Penn Station. Consequently, I had to break off simply after Bernie and his lesbian good friend Carolyn had stolen the Kloppmann Diamond from the Trump Tower-like penthouse of a sleazy billionaire. What about all of the high-tech surveillance cameras, you ask? Block solves this drawback with a daring science-fictional twist you need to uncover for your self.

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Kew Gardens, new dwelling to my good friend Eric, turned out to be the Queens neighborhood the place comic Rodney “I get no respect” Dangerfield grew up, in addition to the location of the stunning 1964 rape and homicide of Kitty Genovese (which impressed Harlan Ellison’s Edgar Award-winning story, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”). That 38 bystanders did nothing to stop and even report this horrific crime is now recognized to be largely unfaithful.

After dropping my curler bag at Eric’s house, I rode the Long Island Rail Road again to “the city” for a small cocktail get together celebrating the Seventy fifth anniversary of the Folio Society. Over the years, I’ve written a half-dozen introductions to numerous Folio editions; therefore the invitation. While downing bite-size crab muffins, I chatted with, amongst others, NPR’s Scott Simon, then admired the newest Folio titles, notably the Seventy fifth-anniversary version of Michael Ende’s “The Neverending Story,” fantastically illustrated by Marie-Alice Harel.

I additionally discovered that Folio, having performed properly with deluxe facsimiles of basic Marvel Comics, would quickly deliver out substantial albums devoted to the DC Comics universe. What’s extra, one in all its editors could be on a panel at New York Comic Con later that very week. Was I going? No, not this yr — a call I regretted once I glimpsed an attractive Batgirl and a muscular Conanesque warrior threading their means by a subway crowd.

Inexplicably, most of Wednesday afternoon appears to have slipped by as I lingered within the basement of the Strand, methodically going by its cabinets of literary biography, essays and criticism. Am I alone to find such looking restful and restorative? In any occasion, my style for cultural byways led me to ship dwelling, to title solely 4 titles, “The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan,” by Ian Bradley; “In the Wake of Diaghilev,” the second half of dance critic Richard Buckle’s autobiography; “The Rare Book Game,” a group of essays by George Sims; and “Evelyn Waugh: Personal Writings 1903-1921,” a quantity within the scholarly Cambridge version of the novelist’s full works.

When Thursday dawned, I toddled off to the New York Public Library for a gathering of the advisory board of Lapham’s Quarterly. While this journal — every problem of which explores a particular theme or concept in depth — is known as for founder Lewis Lapham, that eminent journalist opened this primary post-pandemic, in-person assembly by welcoming its new editor, the best-selling historian Simon Winchester. Then, for 2 hours LQ’s younger staffers together with a dozen writers and students — amongst them Ian Buruma and Francine Prose on the library, and David Cannadine and Linda Colley electronically from Princeton — prompt concepts and texts relating to “Islands,” each precise and metaphorical. Afterward, curator Carolyn Vega displayed island-related treasures from the NYPL’s Berg Collection, equivalent to Robert Louis Stevenson’s copy of “Gulliver’s Travels” and a proof web page of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” with its writer’s marginal corrections.

T.S. Eliot wrote of waste and woe. His personal life offered materials.

That afternoon the climate turned sunny and wonderful, so naturally I sauntered over to one other basement, this time to look at Argosy Book Store’s cabinets of fiction and literary nonfiction. I picked out a half-dozen books, beginning with a good-looking first American version in mud jacket of Nancy Mitford’s comedian novel, “Love in a Cold Climate.” I already owned Max Beerbohm’s “Seven Men,” which comprises the entrancing “Enoch Soames,” “A.V. Laider” and different imaginary portraits, however couldn’t go up a duplicate bearing the bookplate of the famous Beerbohm authority N. John Hall.

On Friday, I loved an almost three-hour lunch with youngsters’s literature scholar Michael Patrick Hearn, who just a few days earlier had hosted a vigorous panel known as “Oz From Page to Stage to Screen” on the Grolier Club. (I watched it on-line.) Michael and I reminisced in regards to the polymath Martin Gardner and favourite youngsters’s writers and illustrators equivalent to James Marshall, Natalie Babbitt, and Leo and Diane Dillon.

In truth, we stopped speaking solely when it was time for me to head for the Grolier Club to catch its two present exhibitions: “Aubrey Beardsley: 150 Years Young” (ending Nov. 12) and “Building the Book From the Ancient World to the Present Day,” subtitled “Five Decades of Rare Book School & the Book Arts Press” (ending Dec. 23). Curated by Barbara Heritage and Ruth-Ellen St. Onge, the RBS present shows gadgets used within the college’s programs, together with a web page from the Mainz Psalter, all kinds of bookbinding instruments, a two-sheet mould from the Wookey Hole paper mill, the lithographic stone that printed the duvet picture of the dime novel “Davy Crockett’s Boy Hunter” and even an previous Rocket eBook.

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The Beardsley exhibit, wealthy in authentic drawings, uncommon posters, holograph letters and far else, attracts from the nonpareil collections of Mark Samuels Lasner. In talks that night Lasner associated just a few of his adventures as a collector, whereas his co-curator, Margaret D. Stetz, considerably impishly mentioned Beardsley’s life in its relationship to beds. The artist — who died at age 25 from tuberculosis — knew beds primarily as locations of sickness and relaxation, however they carry a number of meanings, in addition to an erotic cost, in his provocative illustrations.

When I lastly obtained again to D.C. on Saturday afternoon, my spouse identified that she had rented an influence rake from Home Depot and that, if I knew what was good for me, I’d higher be spending Sunday dethatching useless grass and weeds from the garden. Which is simply what I did. Occasional gallivanting round New York could also be all very properly, however yardwork is perpetually.

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for Book World and the writer of the memoir “An Open Book,” the Edgar Award-winning “On Conan Doyle” and 5 collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book,” “Classics for Pleasure” and “Browsings.”