Page 1 - Books & People, Spring 2017
P. 1
Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 2017
Books&People
IN THIS ISSUE
New Special Collections Librarian
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Event Photos
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Remembering Adventuring East:
Shirley Hazzard
Travels of Two 19th-Century Library Members
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by Harriet Shapiro, Head of Exhibitions
For centuries American and European travelers have ventured beyond the familiar
boundaries of the West in search of the mythical East. Among the wave of nineteenth-
century tourists who sailed to the Levant were New York Society Library members
John L. Stephens (right) and George W. Curtis (left). City Readers, the Library’s digital
collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century circulation records, reveals that
travel books were popular among early members. But Stephens and Curtis had other
plans in mind. They were determined to experience the Orient not from the Victorian
confines of the Library, but first-hand.
Both men were seized by what Rose Macaulay describes as “ruin fever,†a passion for
ancient cities and monuments shared by many American and European travelers to
the Middle East. Lengthy pilgrimages on camel-back had nothing in common with the
conventional Grand Tour of Europe and Greece; that rite de passage undertaken by
the well-heeled ended in Greece, the outer frontier of the Western world. Like other
voyagers into the unknown, Stephens and Curtis returned home to write up accounts
of their adventures.