Out & About
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.
Some of the best nightspots are short-lived, but what about the Lion’s Den Lounge? It lasted for just one evening, sending its guests into revelry with white chaises, bowls of green apples, and green-tinted champagne.
It was an anomaly of chic at the Antiquarian Book Fair, transforming the preview party Thursday into a gathering of the most glamorous bookworms in New York City, among them Gayfryd Steinberg, Yvonne Force Villareal, Shirley Lord, Lauren du Pont, and Lea Carpenter, who looked like a poet’s muse in a J. Mendel gown.
That proved clever. With a relatively low $100 admission price, the party, designed by David Monn, raised $100,000 for the New York Public Library, whose lions inspired the lounge’s name.
Bespectacled seekers of rarities were on the scene. The curator of music manuscripts and books at the Morgan Library, Rigbie Turner, perused a composition by one of Mozart’s children, Franz Xaviar, at the booth of La Scala Autographs. Mr. Turner has a busy week ahead of him, as the Morgan is reopening to the public Saturday. In the reconfigured complex by Renzo Piano, his office is one-fourth the size of his former one, but it does have great views, he said.
At the booth of a Midtown dealer of rare books, maps, and atlases, Martayan Lan, the founder ofPriceline.com, Jay Walker gazed lovingly at Petrus Apianus’s 1540 survey of planetary motion, dubbed by a Harvard historian of science, Owen Gingerich, as “the most spectacular contribution of the bookmaker’s art to 16th-century science.” It is valued at $450,000.
The New York Public Library’s president, Paul LeClerc, said he bought an Allen Ginsberg letter for the library in honor of his wife Judith Ginsberg. Robert P. Morgenthau and his wife Susan purchased a dance manuscript for the library in honor of their daughter, a ballet dancer. Mr. Morgenthau is the son of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau.
The Morgenthaus have been collecting family memorabilia, such as $500 and $1,000 bills with the signature of Mr. Morgenthau’s grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Jr., who served as President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury. “We have two children, so we needed at least two bills to give them,” Mrs. Morgenthau said.
