One of the joys of visiting friends is to quietly peruse their library (ies).  One can learn much about a person from browsing their shelves and finding treasures among their collected books.  There has been much written about how an individual’s library reflects their personhood—what do they buy and then keep?  what do they read?  how do they arrange their books?

This month, Susan and I have been fortunate to stay in a friend’s home in Sausalito, CA where we’ve luxuriated in a home full of books—an art library to match those of many galleries, poetry, fiction, and on an on.  Among those books was this one, a small jewel that includes a 1958 essay by Truman Capote, photographs by David Attie that were taken for this Holiday magazine feature, and a foreword by George Plimpton who died in 2003.

Capote lived in a basement (“garden”) apartment at 70 Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights in the mid-1950’s and was engaged by John Knowles to write this essay about his neighborhood for Holiday Magazine.  His detailed and literary observations of the people, the architecture, and even the street gangs in Brooklyn of that time provide a unique historical perspective to an area that was once the bastion of old money and poor artists and now has some of the highest priced real estate in America.

Capote was a young writer still relatively obscure as he worked on ‘Breakfast at Tiffanys’ and well before ‘In Cold Blood’ vaulted him into the center of literary attention.  A large portfolio of photographs, a few of which were used for the original magazine piece, are presented here as well along with an essay by the photographer’s son who discovered the prints in an old file among his late father’s papers.

This is a lovely volume to read and page through, especially for anyone who lives in present day Brooklyn Heights as my younger daughter did a few years ago.