Newsweek managing editor Jon Meacham was feted last week by members of the magazine, including Lally Weymouth, Rick Smith, Don and Mary Graham, and Mark Whitaker. The party was a celebration of his new book, “American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation” (Random House).

Mr. Smith thanked Mr. Meacham for “reminding us of the Founding Fathers’ genius in creating a system in which we can talk about faith without necessarily falling into discord and division.”

“But as we all know,” he added, “that’s a proposition that is tested regularly, and perhaps none more so than right now.”

The city’s powerful names came out for the party. In attendance were Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who said he was working on his memoirs and is currently writing about the 1950s, and Herman Badillo, who has recently been working on educational reform in Yonkers. Newly minted CBS news anchor Katie Couric was a center of attention.

Also milling about were New Yorker editor David Remnick; Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly; NBC’s Brian Williams; journalist David Brooks, who is working on a book about Greek history around the time of Herodotus; humorist and editor Christopher Buckley; journalist Richard Cohen; Oscar and Annette de la Renta; Peter Osnos; a former publisher of the New York Post, Marty Singerman; Barry Diller; Jim and Toni Goodale; Barbara Walters; and Robert Caro, who is working on another book about Lyndon Johnson.

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TORTOISE TALK On the occasion of Tartan Week, the Scots were here to celebrate the many aspects of their culture. On Friday at the New York Public Library, the director of collection development at the National Library of Scotland, Cate Newton, spoke about the treasures of the John Murray Archive. Housed in the National Library of Scotland, the archive holds materials by and about Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Thomas Malthus, Washington Irving, Charles Darwin, and Herman Melville, among many others. The collection comes from the publishing house of John Murray, which was founded in 1768. Over seven generations, it has come to include 150,000 items.

Though the archives are literary, Ms. Newton said John Murray III was closely identified with science and exploration. He attended Edinburgh University and was interested in geology and mineralogy; along the way he met with John James Audubon. As a student, Murray explored Scotland, and one of the geological topics that most interested him was prehistoric animal footprints in sandstone in Dumfriesshire.

“There is a delightful anecdote of his subsequently attending a meeting at which various professors were attempting to explain the footprints by making tortoises walk on dough,” she said.

The tortoises refused to move, and when they were picked up it was found that the reason was “they had stuck so fast to the piecrust as only to be removed with half a pound of dough sticking to each foot.”

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COMING TO A SHELF NEAR YOU

The dean of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism Thomas Kunkel, is at work on a biography of New Yorker nonfiction writer Joseph Mitchell for Random House … Robert and Mary Bagg of Shelburne Falls, Mass., are working on a biography of poet Richard Wilbur … The Knickerbocker hears that Tom Wolfe’s next book is a novel relating to the contemporary immigrant experience, and Pete Hamill is at work on a novel about the New York Giants in which a child winds up on the doorstep of pitcher John McGraw.

gshapiro@nysun.com