I was traveling to the club's Manhattan offices in April 1985 to try to persuade its executives to allow me to investigate the way their members bought and read books. They seemed mental distractions only, ways of controlling my mounting apprehensionĪbout the impending meeting with company officials. For me New York was something other than the financial capital of the world it was, quite simply, its cultural center-a magnet whose irresistible force captured my youthful attention and foreverĪt the time of that particular train ride from Philadelphia, though, to talk with people at the Book-of-the-Month Club, I did not connect these memories with the task at hand. In the lobby of the building an enormous silver globe was suspended, meant to be a symbol, I suppose, Significantly, each image was connected in my mind with an exhilarating pilgrimage to the city at the side of one of my parents or grandparents to see the Christmas pageant at Radio City Music Hall Broadway musicals such as My Fair Lady, Funny Girl,Īnd The Sound of Music the Museum of Natural History or my father's office in the building that housed the New York Daily News. The predictable result, I suppose, of a suburban childhood defined in countless ways by a desire called New York.

Smell of the fruit stands on Eighth Avenue on a hot August afternoon the deeply shadowed midtown canyon looking up Broadway from Macy's the recollected shock of happening on a single maple turned scarlet on an October Saturday, Each conjured intense, highly sensuous memories: the spangled magnificence of the New York skyline at Christmas, the city dazzling, as if deliberately bedecked for the season the ripe, fetid That had punctuated my New Jersey childhood. Remembering those companionable journeys, I recalled countless other Hudson River crossings My dad and I had used the summer we commuted together into 'the city.' I was twenty then and working at TWA as a reservations agent. My memories were triggered by the train's slow progress past the park-and-ride lot What I was thinking about, I recall, was New York itself. Whatever the cause, I was not thinking about my impending appointment at the Book-of-the-Month Club as the 7:32 Amtrak commuter from Philadelphia crawledĪcross the marshy plain outside Newark on its journey into New York's Penn Station. Or the weight of layered memories evoked by the familiar geography.

The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire

Janice radway