By Stuart Mitchner

With the holiday season in mind, I’ve been surveying a formidable array of luxury coffee table books published by Abrams, Assouline, Phaidon, and Tachsen. My reason for beginning with Abrams isn’t merely alphabetical; it’s because the renowned poet, screenwriter, and novelist Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima mon amour) wrote the introduction to Yves Saint Laurent: Icons of Fashion Design & Photography (Abrams 2020).

While the Abrams press release calls the book “a gorgeous homage to the uncrowned king of haute couture,” Duras offers something more compelling. How does Saint Laurent go about doing what made him designer royalty? The penultimate paragraph of her introduction, from a 1987 essay, begins: “It is like a road. From the night of the intellect comes forth a road and to start the journey down that road one word is needed, or two: ‘hips,’ let us say, and ‘strut.’ Then the hips sway into motion along the road and the rest comes after: legs, arms, the top of the body — they rise out of those sinuous hips swathed in pink, the rest black or a wild blue or a secret red they call amarante, from Cayenne, like the flowers of the same name, like people, like Rimbaud, like Mozart.” more

A Peek Inside The Home of the President and First Family

By Stuart Mitchner

This White House Book Scene features a remarkable first couple who bonded through books and reading, a shared interest that led to the creation of the first White House library. Equally remarkable is the rags to political riches back story of one of the most obscure American presidents, Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), whose personal history has a backwoods, born-in-a-log cabin, reading-by-candlelight charm that prefigures the story of Abraham Lincoln, who moved into the White House a decade later.

As Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz points out in the lead essay in Catherine M. Parisian’s The First White House Library (Penn State University Press 2010), Fillmore “had a greater appreciation for literature and letters than most presidents.” Having grown up in rural poverty, he “prized books and libraries as the chief vehicles of his own ambitions,” and his courtship of his “doted on” teacher Abigail Powers (1798-1853) was “nourished by books.” On his various business and political journeys as a self-made lawyer and member of Congress, Fillmore “made it a point to bring books back to his wife, carton loads at a time, as presents; and well before he became president in 1850, “he had accumulated an impressive library of his own.” During his brief time in office (1850-1853), the Fillmores entertained cultural celebrities of the day, including Washington Irving, the visiting English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, and the Swedish nightingale Jenny Lind.  more

Shipwrecks, Mutinies, & Survival At Sea

By Stuart Mitchner

The sea never changes and its works, for all the talk of men, are wrapped in mystery.

—Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

A well-traveled old friend once told me, “If you want to know what it’s like to command a sailing ship, read Conrad’s The Secret Sharer.” In fact, the story has less to do with the unnamed narrator’s command of an unnamed ship than with the author’s command of the suggestive psychological nuances of the captain’s relationship with the fugitive he rescues and hides in his living quarters. Formerly the chief mate of a ship anchored nearby, the man had been hastily accused and confined for killing a rebellious crew member during a violent storm. After a single conversation, the captain believes the other’s story and empathizes with him, even to the extent of imagining the fugitive as a double of himself. He takes advantage of his status as commander to help conceal his “secret self” from the crew, even when his choices are risky and suspect, most eventfully when he steers the ship dangerously close to an island so that the fugitive can safely escape, “a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

The most surprising stop on the tour of Midwestern cities my father treated me to when I was 12 was Racine, Wisconsin, home of the headquarters of Johnson Wax. Looking forward to Chicago with its skyscrapers, I wanted to drive on. “Just wait, you’ll see,” my father said. What I saw and was amazed by was a city of the future created by Frank Lloyd Wright. After Wright’s otherworldly Research Tower, skyscrapers seemed temporarily passé, so very 1950s. I left thinking of architects as writers whose works are big enough to live in. more

With Help from The Lorax and Greta Thunberg

By Stuart Mitchner

“In The Lorax I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might,” said Dr. Seuss of his favorite book. In a 1990 interview with Publishers Weekly, Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991) admitted “I was a preacher in that book, but I got away with it by disguising the message.”

The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham were a joy to read aloud to my infant son, but The Lorax was more, much more. On the other side of the typically bold and bright Dr. Seuss cover was a dark world of night-blue endpapers dwarfing the bushy-yellow-mustached Lorax, who looked alone and afraid against a haunted night sky while the yellow eyes of the sinister, ever-invisible Once-ler peered through the slats of a boarded up purple window. My then-3-year-old son had no trouble identifying with the boy who finds himself on the Street of the Lifted Lorax at “the far end of town where the Grickle-grass grows and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows and no birds ever sing excepting old crows.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

I’m looking at two photographs. In one my father is sitting with our first cat on his lap, a Siamese male named Kiloo, pronounced “kee-oo.” The small, framed photo occupies a shelf on this desk with an unframed one of me half a century later slouched on the living room sofa with our tuxedo cat, Dizzy, on my lap. Kiloo is poised, as if planning another attack on the clawed-to-rags arms of the living room sofa. Not Dizzy. He’s the picture of contentment, one big white “this-is-mine” paw on my leg. I thought of Kiloo as soon as I opened The Big New Yorker Book of Cats (Random House 2013), where the first thing you see is a full-page color photograph of the cat-clawed arm of a sofa — minor damage compared to the havoc wreaked by Kiloo. more

Harvey S. Firestone Library, Princeton University. (Shutterstock.com)

As Libraries Write New Chapters

Compiled by Wendy Greenberg

Libraries, like most other organizations, have seen a decade adapting to new technology, to shutting down completely in the pandemic, taking on new community roles, and reopening, some with changes. Through it all, librarians have been steadfast leaders of their staffs and captains of their physical spaces. more

By Stuart Mitchner

A year before the invasion of Ukraine, I said in the Fall/Winter 2021 Book Scene that while I’d never actually been to Russia, I lived through “a St. Petersburg summer” in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and spent “my first Russian winter” reading The Brothers Karamazov. The phrasing suggests a naive belief in a literary realm beyond time, space, and politics, a land of no boundaries when, in fact, the novels I was reading were American editions published in New York. more