“Will the day come where there are no more secondhand bookshops?” the poet, essayist, and bookseller Marius Kociejowski asks in his new memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade.” He suspects that such a day will not arrive, but, troublingly, he is unsure. In London, his adopted home town and a great hub of the antiquarian book trade, many of Kociejowski’s haunts—including his former employer, the famed Bertram Rota shop, a pioneer in the trade of first editions of modern books and “one of the last of the old establishments, dynastic and oxygenless, with a hierarchy that could be more or less described as Victorian”—have already fallen prey to rising rents and shifting winds. Kociejowski dislikes the fancy, well-appointed bookstores that have sometimes taken their place. “I want chaos; I want, above all, mystery,” he writes. The best bookstores, precisely because of the dustiness of their back shelves and even the crankiness of their guardians, promise that “somewhere, in one of their nooks and crannies, there awaits a book that will ever so subtly alter one’s existence.” With every shop that closes, a bit of that life-altering power is lost and the world leaches out “more of the serendipity which feeds the human spirit.”
The voice of the marginalized. The lady of the Navigli. The mad poet. Alda Merini didn’t like these labels, but as one of Italy’s most celebrated literary figures, she couldn’t escape them. Countless admirers have been intrigued by her life, from her upbringing along the system of canals in Milan called the Navigli, to her struggles with mental illness as an adult.
“Seeing the real sky, the old-fashioned way, is still important,” said Hummel. “There should be places left … that we can preserve where people can go and experience the night.”
They just called it elevator music back in the day. Everybody understood what the name meant—it was a dismissive term used to describe bland, inoffensive music intended to stay in the background.
But my informal research indicates that elevator music has almost disappeared. I can’t say I’m shedding tears, but part of me laments the loss of a cultural signifier from a simpler time. Like a quixotic crusader for a hopeless cause, I would prefer we keep elevator music, just make it better.
Before COVID-19 and before her second husband fell off a ladder and died in August 2020, she was known for hosting spontaneous dinner parties in her Florida community for a dozen couples. “Hey, if you have enough booze and play Steely Dan, no one cares about the food,” Veronica would say. But her vast network of couple friends withered as the pandemic spread: Older folks isolated, people who lost a partner moved closer to their adult kids. Being a widow, she told me once, was a social liability: “They don’t know what to do with you at dinner parties.” In the span of about six months, her circle of about 20 friends and acquaintances had shrunk to two widowed women. One of them was battling cancer and didn’t feel comfortable socializing during the pandemic.
As the name suggests, the book – published by Phaidon and compiled by American documentary filmmaker Immy Humes – explores the phenomenon of the ‘only woman’ in photography. Humes has made a habit of trawling through photography archives around the world, and her work demonstrates that this kind of imagery has existed since the inception of the camera.
In “A History of Delusions: The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse,” Victoria Shepherd takes us back hundreds of years to investigate extraordinary and well-documented cases of delusion. In doing so, she invites us to understand the logic behind the madness.
Let’s start with a full disclosure: I’m a sucker for Broadway — one of those theater fans who will see five different productions of the same show, who genuflect before cast albums from the ’50s, who inhale theater gossip as if it really mattered. I’m also a sucker for books about Broadway, books as different from one another as Moss Hart’s “Act One,” William Goldman’s “The Season” and Jack Viertel’s “The Secret Life of the American Musical.” But I’ve never read one more entertaining (and more revealing) than Mary Rodgers’s “Shy.” Her voice careens between intimate, sardonic, confessional, comic. The book is pure pleasure — except when it’s jaw-droppingly shocking.
My grandfather spoke Latin at the breakfast table
over his All-Bran and two stewed prunes, read
Paris Match in the loo, referred to his many
grandchildren as little cannon fodder. What else