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Camilla Huey Trades on Her Work, Not Her Name
By CHRISTOPHER PETKANAS. Published: April 11, 2012 THESE days, red-carpet cynosures name-check designers like they’re reading a Sears catalog. But one person remains uncited: Camilla Huey. In an era when the brow-threader of every actress is demanding her 15 minutes, Ms. Huey helps realize other designers’ visions (as well as her own) with her company [...]
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On Collecting
Style reveals the man. The building of a library is an act of style, an expression of what we are and a good measure of who we are. Collecting is an act of self-realization. One collects books and builds a library to create an intensified environment. It is a philosophical statement as this room is [...]
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From the Library of John Waters
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 [...]
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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 [...]
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Susanna Moore on the Book as Aphrodisiac
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, all knew her. She was beautiful, [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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On Bibliophiles
Reading, the unpunished vice, promises, as most vices do, a finer world within the world. Beyond the narrow realm of our senses is the greater reality retained in and contained by that cumbersome and collectable commodity, the book. While all book collectors consider themselves bibliophiles, most bibliophiles perceive collecting as the precious sport of a [...]
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Chet Baker
Deep in a Dream By James Gavin As Though I Had Wings By Chet Baker At 3 a.m. on May 13, 1988, Chet Baker nodded out, threw himself out, or was thrown out of, a hotel room window in Amsterdam, quite as if he had wings. Long ago and far away, I dreamed a [...]
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Pimpnology
Regarding Players, Hoze, Johns & The Life “Police, politicians, businessmen, lawyers, dope dealers, prostitutes, pimps-all are dependent on one another, yet all prey on one another. In modern urban life, none of us is immune to this kind of social network; the very life of the city is made up of such networks. Sociologists and [...]
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On the Origin & Importance of Small & Fugitive Pieces
The Black World Today Harlem, New York I’ve recently read, with great interest, that the African American Literature section of the Borders Books store at the Stonecrest mall in Lithonia, Ga, is suffering a pestilence of “pornography for black women.” The earnest author, most recently of A Love Story, Nick Chiles reports to the New [...]
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Chinua Achebe
KURT THOMETZ NEW YORK CITY Things Falling Together On Saturday, May 4, the great Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah) spoke at NYU’s Vanderbilt Hall. It was an elegant venue for the man who is arguably the greatest literary stylist of the second half of [...]
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I Need a Dollar – Aloe Blacc
Things Fall ApartAcross 160th Street
Rarely seen underground classic starring Kurt Thometz, owner of Jumel Terrace Books, NYC. Shot almost entirely in Washington Heights, Mr. Thometz’s Checker automobile is co-star of this high budget, violent story about smuggling the controversial novels of Milt Gross into New York in the 1970s. Mr. Thometz is patiently awaiting his next film offer.
