From the Library Of…

John Waters

From the Library of John Waters

http://antihousewife.com/tag/research/ Reading as a Pleasant Deviation: A Guided Tour of John Waters Library I was not a book fanatic until I was fifteen and discovered Genet and Burroughs and all these Grove Press books and thought, thank God, I’m not that abnormal. That opened up a whole new world to me. Those were my friends. Tennessee […]

Albert Murray

From the Library of Albert Murray

That shelf is where my real stuff is. See it start with Joyce and come up to Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. That’s it. That’s the contemporary literature I read. Those people in those books up there on the shelves provide a solid base to enable us to get to it all. There’s Mann’s Joseph and […]

Susanna Moore

Susanna Moore on the Book as Aphrodisiac

(photo: a gift from the author) My first acquaintance with Susanna just precedes the publication of her first novel, My Old Sweetheart, when we “met cute”. I was selling books at a carriage trade shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that several of her friends frequented; our bi-coastal movie clientele, it turned out, […]

Alan Pryce-Jones's bookplate

From the Library of Alan Pryce-Jones

From my diary June 25, 1991 Mr. Pryce-Jones’s houses are on John Street in the heart of Old Newport.  Three mid-Ninteenth Century saltboxes.  His principle residence is at 46 where we found a note addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Thometz asking us to check in at #50.  I hadn’t been prepared for a compound. The […]

Fran Lebowitz

Fran Lebowitz On Reading

As told to Kurt Thometz.  I’m not a collector. I don’t care about things like that. I not a collector because I’m not that organized. I’m not grown-up enough to collect things, but I have acquired a stellar collection of odd books, weirdo books, books that don’t fit easily into categories. I have a very […]

Photo of Diana Vreeland by Richard Avedon

From the Library of Diana Vreeland

“Let’s suppose you were a total stranger – and a very good friend. That’s a good combination. What would you want to know about me? And how would you go about finding it out? To me the books I’ve read are the gateway. My life has been more influenced by books than by any other […]