Posts from Jefferson Market Library

Melissa Walker's newest book, Small Town Sinners, is about a girl named Lacey that is torn between falling in love and keeping her faith — all while taking a lead role in her town's sin-depicting haunted house.

Thank you for joining us in the Reader's Den this month! I hope you have enjoyed reading A Room with a View. Have you given any thought to what Lucy and George's future might hold? What about Charlotte Bartlett and Cecil Vyse?

Jefferson Market Library's Summer Art Display, Valhalla Hospital: The Art of the Moody Wallen Band, exhibits over 50 line drawings, watercolors, acrylics, and oil paintings throughout the entire building, as well as a visual installation display and rotating video program every Thursday from 5 to 6 p.m. through August 18, inside the program room.

A Room with a View begins its second part at the Honeychurch home in Surrey, a county in the south of England. Much has happened since we last saw Lucy: after she and Charlotte left Florence in a mad haste, they traveled to Rome, where they met fellow countrymen Cecil Vyse and his mother. As this section opens, Cecil is proposing to Lucy (for the third time) in the garden, as her mother peeks anxiously out the drawing room window. Once Lucy has accepted his proposal, we begin to see that Cecil is at best pretentious, and at worst positively insufferable.

E.M. Forster's 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is divided in to two parts: the first takes place in Florence, and the second in England. This week's questions will focus on part one, for those who are reading the book for the first time this month. I have read this book several times, and for me, it improves with each reading. Basically, I'm obsessed with both the book and the Merchant Ivory film adaptation, so please excuse my exuberance! I hope you are enjoying it as well, whether it is your first or your tenth read.

"So enamored is he of light and air blowing through his fictions that it is impossible for him to be dull or stuffy or anything but deliciously fresh and original," wrote Henry James Forman for the New York Times of E. M. Forster (1879-1970) in 1923. Who doesn't want a little light and air in their reading during the heat of summer, as well as some romance?

Needless to say (but apparently I’m saying it anyway!), one can be moved, changed, and inspired by words. Or disgusted, angered, and bored — but that’s a different blog post — or is it?

Has somebody recently called you Miss Fairgrounds or wished you a Happy Easter, Sugar... in June? You can find out what they meant in the basement of Jefferson Market Library.

What are you reading this summer? At Jefferson Market Library, we want to know!

Are you sanguine, choleric, melancholic or phlegmatic?

A visionary? A judger? A thinker or feeler? A catalyst? A diamond? A three?

In 1921, the grandad of Psychological Typology, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), defined "introversion" and "extraversion," laying the groundwork for today's psychometric questionnaires and self-reflection gimmicks. 

Here are some recently published, non-academic books, all available at NYPL, that are designed for "discovery" and self-reflection:

When Bill German was a teenager, he created a zine about his favorite band, The Rolling Stones, called Beggars Banquet. The year was 1978, and little did he know, but the pages he was diligently printing at his Brooklyn High School would later lead him to become the band’s official historian for over two decades. He traveled the world with them, stayed at their homes, witnessed their concerts, recording sessions, and in-fights and lived to write a book about it: Under Their Thumb. Saturday May 21st 2pm at Tompkins Square Library, Bill German will share humorous Stones anecdotes and never before seen photographs. 

I'm getting married next week, and if you, like me, are planning a wedding and wondering why you didn't just go to city hall, you should know that there are a wealth of resources at the New York Public Library. Whether you are trying to be thrifty, crafty, design your own flowers, or pick a location, you can find ideas at the library, and you won't have to pay a wedding planner for them.

The first Saturday of May is approaching, and with it comes derby day in Louisville, Kentucky, the city where I was born. It's a time when celebrities flock to town, the bars stay open all night, and the nation focuses on Louisville for the two minutes the Kentucky Derby takes to run. These books, films, and recording artists will give you a little bit of Kentucky any time of year.

Sometimes it isn't about the destination. Here's a list of all things that take me on a mental trip across America's highways.  

Did you know that the Jefferson Market library has an archive of images, papers and press clippings dating back to the 1800s?  This collection of Greenwich Village history has recently been processed and made available to the public by archivist and librarian Barbara Knowles-Pinches, who began working at Jefferson Market in 2009.  The digitizing process has just begun; images and a finding aid will be available online in the near future. Here, Barbara tells us about some of her favorite items from the archive. 

Debbie is a literary agent and all-around superpatron at Jefferson Market.

Whether you grew up there or just read about it in books or seen it in the movies, Suburbia is a most definite and unique place.  With these books, movies and CDs you can visit without ever having to take the Long Island Railroad!  So if you did grow up there—maybe it’s time to go home again. And if you didn’t—scroll through this list and see what you missed!

In celebration of Women's History Month, I have put together a list of works that I feel are essential to feminist theory/feminist thought. From proto-feminism to third-wave post-modernist, here are some of my (mostly Western) favorites. What are some feminist works you favorite or feel are essential to the canon?