New York Emanations, Literary and Otherwise

If you love New York, books, or both, please check out this cool feature from the New York Times Book Review--an interactive map of literary history in our city.

It has just one E.B. White reference--Stuart Little sailing his toy boat in Central Park--but the spirit of the whole thing reminds me of this favorite passage from White's classic essay Here Is New York:

I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90-degree heat, halfway down an air shaft, in midtown. No air moves in or out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by emanations from the immediate surroundings. I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from the publisher's office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman on the nose, four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle, thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska . . .

And White continues like this for another third of a page, adding parenthetically "(I could continue this list indefinitely)."

Sigh. Isn't New York wonderful? And isn't it wonderful being in the book business?