Meeting up at the Strand

I got there about 20 minutes before my mother. I haven’t been to the Strand in a while, and I always have to deal with about 5 or 10 minutes of jittery anxiety upon arrival, kind of like Hope being faced with a bowl of Fancy Feast and a bowl of dry food. What do I do first?? My brain will explode! It is the most satisfying of bookstores – a combination of good prices, helpful staff, amazing selection, and general atmosphere (no music blaring like at Barnes & Noble, a pet peeve of mine.) It’s always an absolute madhouse so that’s the only thing that might be negative about it, but that’s part of the experience, too. My mother and I were walking around at one point and she said, “Isn’t it so nice … to see hundreds of people browsing through books?” It certainly is. And it just feels different than a big chain. It feels more serious. As well as MANIC. The prices can be so low that it catapults people, myself included, into a kind of mania. There is danger of going into a fugue state. Or something akin to Steve Martin in “The Jerk”, grabbing every single thing that comes in his path. “I need THIS … oh, and I need THIS …” Need?? Hundreds of dollars later you stagger out with 30 books in 5 bags, and you have no idea what you have bought. I speak from personal experience!

Mum and Siobhan were coming in from Brooklyn, where they were visiting Cormac, Liam and Lydia’s new glorious baby … and Mum called me at about 5 pm, just as I was approaching The Strand, to say they would be there in about 20 minutes.

“Okay. I’ll be back in the Entertainment Biography section.”
“Of course you will.”

I began to get heart palpitations as I made my way through the THRONGS around all the sales tables. And I kept getting diverted. “Oh, I need THIS …” “Oh, look, I need THIS.”

Mum and Siobhan arrived 20 minutes later, and I had my arms full of books, many of them over-sized. My arms were falling off. What was I thinking? Did I imagine that I would be air-lifted out of there? But I was in a fugue state, and the most expensive of the books in my arms was 12.95 – and it was an enormous book called “Forties Gals” – with profiles and pictures of all the big actresses of the 1940s, you know – all the dames I love. In a regular bookstore, that book might be 40 bucks. So, you know, I went a little crazy.

Siobhan had to work that night, so she left us – and Mum and I had a wonderful time, browsing and talking and sharing. I was pretty much done by the time they arrived. I had chosen:

1. Together Again – by the wonderful gossipy Garson Kanin – a book where he analyzes great movie couples – Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall, et al

2. The aforementioned Forties Gals books which probably weighed 10 pounds by itself

3. Movie Poster – a huge coffee table book analyzing the development of the art of the movie poster. I am drooling.

4. My Mother’s Keeper – the bitchy tell-all book about Bette Davis by her grumpy daughter. And yeah, this is the book that has the immortal words “My SNEAKERS were sticking to the TAR, shit!”

5. Harlow – by Irving Shulman. Salacious and terribly written, it is a great book. I read it in high school, and was so afraid of the story of Paul Bern and what happened to him that this book emitted a dark glow from the shelves, drawing me back to it again and again. Now I own it.

6. Baby, I Don’t Care. Take a wild guess who this book is about.

7. A marvelous book called Antique Packaging. It has no text. It is an art book. Image after image of old sardine cans and match books and things like that – from days gone by. Gorgeous.

8. This last one I am particularly excited about. It is enormous (again) – I have hard little biceps just from carrying my books around yesterday – and it is called The Poster in History. Another huge art book, detailing the history of the poster – not just for movies but for propaganda purposes – various war efforts, or the ideological battle for Communism – I love that crap, as I have written before … and some of these posters, even some with causes I not only don’t agree with but vehemently oppose – are works of art. I can’t wait to look through it. Maybe I’ll do some scanning. What a shock.

Other books I had that I put back – not because I judged them as unworthy – but because basically I feared my arms would fall off:

— a giant book of Richard Avedon photos
— a giant book of photos of Steve McQueen
— a massive compilation of all of the writings of Kenneth Tynan

I just couldn’t carry them all.

Then Mum and I went upstairs to the art books section and had a great time browsing. They have whole sections called “Art Papers” – which are almost like huge bins of sheet music that you just have to flip through, hoping to find the nugget of gold in the bottom of the sieve. Mum spent a lot of time there, as I looked at the photography books, getting sucked in to all the great Life books of photos. Mum found some good things there … one was a small monograph of the work of Gabriele Münter – someone I had never heard of, but we both oohed and ahed over her work. The monograph was falling apart, it had obviously been donated to the Strand (much of what you find in the Art Papers bins are things of that nature – programs to art shows at a gallery in Prague, stuff like that – very cool, but you need to have the patience to weed through). When we got back to my apartment, we looked Münter up on the Internet, and found out some fascinating details about her life. My God. She obviously is mainly known for saving the works of Kandinsky, hiding them in her basement from the Nazis (and a couple of the works only exist through photographs she took of them – astonishing) … but she was quite an artist in her own right. Mum really enjoyed looking through them all. So that was one thing she bought.

She also bought another art book – with impressionists from England – only, of course, the main ones were from Ireland. England can claim them all they want, these folks are Irish. Irish art is a passion of the O’Malley clan – mainly because you just have to go along with my father’s obsessions or you will be left out of the conversation at the dinner table … but Mum, of course, as a painter, has a lot of interest in these people as well. She could glance at a page and say, “Oh, that’s by …” and list the name.

So we both were very happy with our purchases. Then we walked down the block (and yesterday was the first real spring day, so New Yorkers were basically going MAD wearing shorts and mini skirts and looping about the sidewalks in glee) to go have dinner at Siobhan’s restaurant. We didn’t really (of course) get to talk to Siobhan … only briefly … but it was an environment of care and nurturing, because the entire staff knows us, the owner knows us … and it was like going to have dinner at the house of a family friend. Only we were at a bar/restaurant in the East Village. It was the right choice. Mum and I had a great meal, and lots of good talk … and I am, of course, always excited to be able to host her, when she comes down.

It was a relief to get to the car (we took a cab) because, man, our books were dragging us down.

When we got back to my place, we promptly got into our pajamas, and sat around, looking through our books, sharing this or that image, talking about things like Kandinsky and Nureyev and Saul Bass … until finally we started fading, and fell asleep.

A good spring day in New York.