• Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to secondary sidebar

New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Adirondacks & NNY
  • Capital-Saratoga
  • Mohawk Valley
  • Hudson Valley & Catskills
  • NYC & Long Island
  • Western NY
  • History
  • Nature & Environment
  • Arts & Culture
  • Outdoor Recreation
  • Food & Farms
  • Subscribe
  • Support
  • Submit
  • About
  • New Books
  • Events
  • Podcasts

What’s On Your New York History Reading List?

December 15, 2011 by Peter Feinman 3 Comments

Another one bites the dust. That was the message of a recent article in the New York Times (Mourning a Cultural Hub Disguised as a Used Bookstore, November 28, 2011) about the closing of a book store in Metuchen, NJ. As one patron of the bookstore noted of the owner, “(H)e turned it into a kind of a clubhouse for the community [where everyone knew your name] and somehow it worked.”

Another customer added, “The Raconteur was not just a book store. It was what a bookstore should be, with an owner who used it as [a] place to enlighten, delight, and inspire.” The passing of the bookstore generated this eulogy from a third customer: “I really felt as if someone had just died. You have given this community a soul and heart.”

Similar stories could be told of the closing in bookstores in other communities [I finally get to use the file of articles I have been accumulating!] Consider the following title from March 21, 2009, from the same newspaper and by the same author about an event in his own home town: “A Bookstore Closes in Chappaqua, and a Town Is Poorer for It.” A similar story occurred in the village of Cold Spring, with its picturesque Main Street leading to the Hudson River in Putnam County. I have walked that street with teachers as part of an immersion experience in local history in a single community. Bookstores were part of the fabric of the community, part of its web of life, a way of life that has become not just boxed-stored but digitized.

Near the Salmagundi Book store in Cold Spring was what once was the local Bijou or one-screen movie theater that every town had. How far do you have to travel now to see a movie? To the mailbox to get the delivery from Netflix! To your couch/chair to turn on the computer to stream a movie. The pace of change has been extraordinary and the sense of community, the sense of place, the feeling of belonging has suffered accordingly.

The first article I cut out of the newspaper [how’s that for quaint?] on this subject was the closing of the Shakespeare & Company bookstore on the Upper West Side in Manhattan in 1996. The venerable store was located one block from the new Barnes & Noble box store that had been plunked down and which created a brand new reading experience for the residents of Woody Allen country. As this new life form matured it sucked the life out of the now obsolete neighborhood stores that it dwarfed. Sounds like the story would make a good movie, which in a way it did with You’ve Got Mail.

But this wave of the future proved short-lived. Amazon showed there was another way to purchase books, one requiring no human contact or even leaving one’s home. Borders then bit the dust and Barnes & Noble tottered as it tried to play catchup with Amazon. Then along came Kindle and even the physicality of the book was rendered “so 20th-century.” It’s hard to believe Fahrenheit 451 was WRITTEN not even 60 years ago.

What does this all mean for history in general and New York history in particular? We are a story-telling species with the need to gather, to assemble, to share. The more we learn about the stone-structures of the neolithic age when people first lived with people to whom they were not related, the more we realize the defining importance to humanity of bonding through shared-storytelling. Once upon a time, long before Oprah, the Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle used the mails to educate millions across the country and then bring them together in Chautauqua, NY to continue their enlightenment. Our archaeological society book club meets monthly at a local library to discuss the book the members have read. The New York Council for the Humanities offers “conversation” programs which can be about New York history.

So let’s not reinvent the wheel, let’s update it. Chautauqua created a reading list for its members which included extensive reading in history. What would a reading list for New York State history contain? For your region? For your county? For your municipality? How can these books be made available to the community? Can New York State history book clubs be created by our historical societies, municipal historians, museums, publishers, and bookstores? Of course this already is being done at different places throughout the state. Now we really need to work at it.

Photo: “Dover Book Shop, 2672 Broadway, New York” (March 23, 1945) by Sam Gottscho, courtesy Shorpy. Founded in 1941, Dover now focuses on catalog and online sales from its offices in Mineola, NY.

 

 

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Chautauqua County, New York Council for the Humanities, Office of Cultural Education, Peter Feinman, Publishing

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Anonymous says

    December 16, 2011 at 7:40 PM

    I especially like the idea of a central location where we could register works in progress.

    The places to browse for Herkimer County books are:

    Willis Monie Books
    http://www.wilmonie.com

    Herkimer County books
    http://rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nyhchs/books.html

    Newport, NY, book
    http://rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nynhc/giftshop.htm

    Reply
  2. Jonathan Kruk says

    December 22, 2011 at 5:02 PM

    Body Boots & Britches by Harold Thompson, is my favorite book on New York’s history and lore. Granted as a storyteller of NY lore, with a keen interest in colonial times, I like Russell Shorto’s “Island at the Center of the World”
    Currently, I’m reading “Washington’s Westchester Gamble” by Richard Borkow and “The Saw Mill River Valley War” both Westchester County authors.

    Reply
  3. Jolanda Jansen, P.E., Esq. says

    January 8, 2012 at 12:03 PM

    I am currently reading “Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations” edited by Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis Van Minnen and Giles Scott-Smith, published by the SUNY Press and copy righted by the Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, the Netherlands.

    I am borrowing the book from Harvey Flad, the author of “Main Street to Main Frames: Landscape and Social Change in Poughkeepsie.” Both books address a lot of cultural issues that I find absolutely fascinating.

    My third recommendation that is broader than just New York State, but nevertheless has a powerfull effect on present day New York is “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson. What a compassionate telling of how many of our fellow African-American New Yorkers came to this area from the segregated South.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Help Finish Our 2022 Fundraising

Subscribe to New York Almanack

Subscribe! Follow the New York Almanack each day via E-mail, RSS, Twitter or Facebook updates.

Recent Comments

  • Edythe Ann Quinn on Black History Historiographic Genealogies: Sources & Resources
  • Your New Neighbor on Saratoga Corruption & The Destruction of Cale Mitchell
  • Joyce Kelly- Feeley on Troy Orphan Asylum: Vanderheyden’s Legacy Exhibit Opening
  • Adrienne Saint-Pierre on Hibernation: How It Works
  • GARY SCHOEN on Moose Are Back in New York State: A Population Update
  • Deb Heller on Catskills Resort History: The Beginning of the End
  • John Warren on Civil War in the Mohawk Valley: The Battle of Oriskany
  • Richard Daly on Poetry: Mention It, Don’t Insist
  • Norma Coney on Civil War in the Mohawk Valley: The Battle of Oriskany
  • David Forest on Knapp’s Folly: Sullivan County’s Columbia Hotel

Recent New York Books

The Great New York Fire of 1776
The Sugar Act and the American Revolution
battle of harlem hights
Ladies Day at the Capitol
voices of wayne county
CNY Snowstorm book front cover
The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era
Expanded Second Edition of Echoes in These Mountains
historic kingston book

Secondary Sidebar

preservation league
Protect the Adirondacks Hiking Guide