OLD GUARD AND NEW (YORK TIMES)

The Times they are a-changin’. The New York Times has announced they will publish paid wedding, anniversary, engagement, and partnership announcements on advertising pages in its weekly Sunday Styles section. Price tag? $48 a line.

This move by the Gray Lady appears to have met with a darkened mood in at least one traditional quarter. A rare news release from the Social Register Association dated yesterday reads, “It will never be our policy to sell such announcements as a leading daily newspaper has just done.” It sets to reassure its subscribers that it will continue to offer its listees at no cost in its Social Register Observer section of its summer and winter editions. The Social Register is published by Forbes.

“Furthermore,” the release continues, “we wish to state that the Social Register will continue to report the most important event in a young (or old) couple’s life in a dignified, sympathetic and cheerful manner, as we have always done in former times. In addition, the Register will never be guilty of adopting a cruel and demeaning tone when reporting weddings and engagements as has become so popular in certain publications in recent years. Listees may be assured that they will continue to be treated with respect by the Register in the future as we have invariably done in the past.”

The New York Times already offers paid death notices.

People can still have their names appear in print only thrice: upon birth, marriage, and death. Nowadays, it might cost a little more.

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EDITH IN ENGLAND

Hermione Lee gave a recent lecture at the New York Public Library on someone who was truly “Old Guard” New York: Edith Wharton. The talk was called “Edith Wharton’s English Life: The Road Not Taken.” Ms. Lee is the Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature and a fellow of New College at Oxford, and currently a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the NYPL. She has written a prize-winning biography of Virginia Woolf, a critical study of Philip Roth, and the forthcoming “Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography” (Princeton University Press).

She joked that she gets frustrated upon repeatedly hearing the same question about both Woolf and Wharton: What is there left to say about her?

Wharton’s creative achievement included the “ruthless” satirizing of the snobbery of the English upper class in works such as “The Buccaneers.” Ms. Lee argues that Wharton was anti-Bloomsbury and would certainly not have gotten along with Virginia Woolf.

Wharton spent a long time deciding whether to buy a place in Coopersale, England. In the end, she decided against it; she felt she would have been lonely. There was also a crippling British income tax on foreign residents. Henry James called it “the house of Coopersale” in a letter – a clear reference to Poe’s house of Usher.

Wharton rented a place called “Stocks” in Hertfordshire from Mrs. Humphry Ward in the summer of 1914 instead. Ward charged extra for the garden vegetables, and also failed to tell Wharton that there was no telephone.

The audience laughed when Ms. Lee said Ward’s house was – many years later – apparently a training center for Playboy Bunnies.

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GOTHAM GAL

Remember Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye” saying that he wished he could call up the writer of a book he’d liked? The Gotham Gazette Book Club does just that every month. At the New Amsterdam branch of the New York Public Library on Murray Street, they met on Wednesday with New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert, author of “Prophet of Love: And Other Tales of Power and Deceit” (Bloomsbury USA).

Ms. Kolbert said she “stumbled” into political reporting when she was a junior reporter in Albany. But she soon found revelations of “the human comedy” fascinating. She read from a piece, “Accountant in the Sky.”

She elaborated on the nature of the committee system in Albany, where Assemblymen gather behind closed doors and hash out problems with legislation. Most bills that get to the floor will inevitably pass, she said: If a bill won’t pass, it never gets to the floor. She quoted a longtime politico who said that, of 75,000 bills in his lifetime, he has seen only four come to the floor with an uncertain outcome!

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DUVEEN DETAILS

How does an art dealer reach the top? Meryle Secrest gave some answers, speaking about her new biography “Duveen: A Life in Art” (Knopf) at Christie’s. A portrait of Joseph Duveen by the Swiss artist Felix Muller-Ury hung in the room.

She told about the life of Duveen (1869-1939), the English art connoisseur and dealer who became a major figure in the creation of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He sold Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy” to H.E. Huntington. He got the ear of William Randolph Hearst, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, and others; their checkbooks followed.

Ms. Secrest quoted Behrman’s comment about Duveen making his career by noticing “that Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money.”

He would do almost anything to ingratiate himself. She said Duveen remembered the names and ages of clients’ children. But his memory was not infallible: He once sent a rocking horse to a 15-year-old.

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THE EYES HAVE IT

Travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon spoke at the Explorers Club on Tuesday, describing his experiences aboard a Scottish trawler. After the talk, he passed around a giant fish eye in formaldehyde for the delectation of the audience.