Words on the Street
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The Argosy Book Store, an antiquarian’s paradise, puts its litter out on Thursdays at 5 p.m. That gives you a blissful half-hour of discreet scavenging in the atrium before bins are dragged to the curb. Excavating Argosy’s boneyard is like shopping at Syms: You have to be persistent to find something right. But when you do, your heart lifts: a torn, unsalable memorandum of bullion deposited by the Amador Mining Company with Thomas Price, Bullion Melter, penned in a hasty Copperplate and dated August 30, 1832; the innards of “Cyrano von Bergerac,” printed in Stuttgart,1922, shorn of its cover; a ripped manila envelope bearing the return address of a War Department office in Louisville, Ky. How about the first half of a 1902 Larousse, dotted with tiny steel engravings?
No true New Yorker is too squeamish to persevere through rotted fruit peels to unearth an envelope addressed in a round hand to Miss Katherine Duggs, 40 W. 67th Street, with a 2c stamp postmarked December 30, 1930, at 5 p.m. Long Island City; or a crumbling program for “Peg O’ My Heart” at the Cort Theatre (“The most beautiful playhouse in America”), April 14, 1913. I love these fragile testimonies to literacy and their particular moments in time. These authors took to pen and paper innocent of the word processor and e-mail that would eventually strip handwriting of its social commission. The graphic charm of old script had little to do with class or advanced education but much to do with system, practice, and a common cultural faith in the worth of doing it well. An ice-truck driver might have a hand as clear and diligent as an Ursuline novice.
While you are at the Argosy, don’t miss the outdoor shelves of $1 books. Just last week I seized a 1965 Penguin paperback of “Wuthering Heights.” I didn’t need the book, but could not leave David Daiches’s valuable introduction or the editor’s preface to the 1850 edition, written two years after Emily Bronte died. The pseudonymous editor, Charlotte, had felt “a sacred duty to wipe the dust off … gravestones.”
I know the feeling.
