Page 1 - Books & People, Spring 2017
P. 1

Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 2017



   Books&People



IN THIS ISSUE



New Special Collections Librarian

                               PAGE 3



Event Photos

       PAGE 6



 Remembering                           Adventuring East:

Shirley Hazzard

                                       Travels of Two 19th-Century Library Members

                          PAGE 11

                                       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.
   1   2   3   4   5   6