Here Is New York (public library) by E. B. White: In the sweltering summer of 1948, E. B. White sat down in a hotel room and penned what endures as the most heartening love letter to New York — a roaming essay full of wit, wisdom, and immutable affection for the city as an icon, a friend, an intricate ecosystem of triumphs and tragedies, a canvas for the vibrancy of life. “A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning,” he writes. “The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.” Sample this gem with Literary Jukebox.
New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009 (public library): This dimensional mosaic portrait of the city, one of the best history books of 2012, draws on the private journals of the writers, artists, thinkers, and tourists, both famous and not, who dwelled in Gotham’s grid over the past four hundred years. Culled from the archives of libraries, museums, and private collections, these engrossing entries invite us into the private worlds of such luminaries as Charles Dickens, Jack Kerouac, Simone de Beauvoir, and Mark Twain, leaving us with an ever-deeper appreciation of our shared existence in this glorious city. Sample some of the entries here.
Mapping Manhattan: A Love (And Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers (public library) edited by Becky Cooper: A tender cartographic love letter to this timeless city of multiple dimensions, parallel realities, and perpendicular views, featuring 75 hand-drawn memory maps from both strangers and famous New Yorkers alike, including cosmic sage Neil deGrasse Tyson, artist-philosopher Yoko Ono, wire-walked Philippe Petit, author Malcolm Gladwell, and chef David Chang. See some of the hand-drawn cartographic goodness, including my own addition, here.
This Is New York (public library) by Miroslav Šašek: Though this lovely 1960 gem, the first American city in Sašek’s legendary This Is series, was originally designed with a child-reader in mind, the vibrant vintage illustrations leap off the pages to enchant children and grown-ups in equal measure, New Yorkers and visitors, admirers of big bustling streets and lovers of quiet little corners.
Changing New York (public library) by Berenice Abbott: Between 1935 and 1939, pioneering photographer Berenice Abbott made 307 black-and-white prints of New York City that endure as some of the most iconic images of Gotham’s changing face. In advance of the 1939 World’s Fair, 200 of them were gathered in this collection, along with a selection of variant images, line drawings, period maps, and background essays — a lavish time-capsule of urban design organized in eight geographical sections, documenting the social, architectural, and cultural history of the city. See some of her extraordinary photographs here.
All the Buildings in New York (That I’ve Drawn So Far) (public library) by James Gulliver Hancock: When Australian illustrator James Gulliver Hancock moved to New York City, he set out to “own” his new home in a unique way: by drawing every single building in town. Collected here are the best of these drawings — a charmingly illustrated tour of Gotham’s cityscape and architecture, from icons to oddities, spanning the entire urban spectrum in between. Peek inside here.
Manhattan ’45 (public library) by Jan Morris: Jan Morris paints a remarkably dynamic portrait of the city as it was on June 25, 1945 — the day 14,000 American servicemen and women, the first contingent returning from the victory over Nazi Germany, sailed into New York aboard the British liner Queen Mary — reconstructed in 1987, when the book was originally published. From the novelty of stockings to the technological marvel of high-rise elevators to the class-equalizing power of a heat wave, she blends the mesmerism of time-travel with the absorbing voyeurism of travel writing, transporting us to a city at once curiously foreign and comfortably familiar. Sample it with this lovely abstract depicting Gotham’s heat wave as the ultimate class equalizer (plus a curious biographical detail about Morris, who was born James and became Jan).
Paris versus New York: A Tally of Two Cities (public library) by Vahram Muratyan: Graphic designer Vahram Muratyan, a self-described “lover of Paris wandering through New York,” chronicles the peculiarities and contradictions of the two cities through “a friendly visual match” of minimalist illustrated parallel portraits — vibrant visual dichotomies and likenesses, from beverages to beards, hands to houses, that capture the intricacies of cultural difference with equal parts humor and affection. This gem was one of the best art books of 2012 — peek inside it and chuckle here.
Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (public library) by Eric Sanderson: Landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson spent more than a decade trying to reconstruct what Henry Hudson saw on that fateful day of September 12, 1609, when he first set foot on the island that would become Manhattan. His is a masterful feat of a kind of analog augmented reality — using an 18th-century map geographically overlaid upon the layout of modern-day Manhattan and troves of historic documents and scientific data, Sanderson takes us on a lavishly illustrated tour of the wild forests of Times Square, the sunny meadows of Harlem, and the soggy swamps of Soho.
Central Park: An Anthology (public library) edited by Andrew Blauner: Twenty of the New York’s most celebrated authors — including Adam Gopnik, Mark Helprin, Colson Whitehead, and Francine Prose — pay homage to one particular, and particularly beloved, part of the city, inviting us on a literary walk through the park with some of the most intensely interesting companions imaginable. Sample the absorbing tales here.
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