Happy Birthday to New York City’s Rizzoli Bookstore, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary with a series of events that began this fall and will run into 2025. They include conversations with Laurie Anderson, David Godlis, Garth Greenwell, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ira Sachs, Patti Smith, and Chris Stein, among others. In addition, New York ensemble Tredici Bacci pays tribute to Rizzoli’s influential role as a film producer with a concert inspired by the soundtracks Nino Rota composed for Federico Fellini’s films. There will also be limited-run collections of anniversary tote bags and pencils.
The store was founded in 1964 by Italian entrepreneur Angelo Rizzoli, who was a publisher of books, newspapers, and magazines, and owner of a chain of bookstores in Milan, including the Rizzoli flagship store located in the Galleria. He also was a producer of classic films such as Fellini’s 8½, Une Parisienne, and La Dolce Vita.
The original store was in Midtown in the Scribner Building at 597 Fifth Avenue. The store later moved to the Henri Bendel Building at 712 Fifth Avenue, and then to 57th Street, where the shop became an institution. Additional stores opened in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, and other cities, as well as three additional locations in New York. While the other locations no longer operate, in 2014, Rizzoli Bookstore relocated to its current home on Broadway in the Beaux-Arts Saint James Building in the heart of the NoMad neighborhood.
During its 60 years, the bookstore has had both a screening room and served as the backdrop for many TV shows and movies, including Law & Order, Manhattan, Falling in Love, The Room Next Door, and more.
Rizzoli Bookstore specializes in literature, photography, architecture, interior design, culinary, and the fine and applied arts. The store also stocks a selection of Italian-, French-, and Spanish-language fiction and nonfiction. The bookstore regularly hosts a range of events, including book launches, concerts, performances, wine tastings, and creative workshops.
Before Google, reference librarians answered questions via telephone. “We learned not merely how to find information but how to think about finding information. Don’t take anything for granted; don’t trust your memory; look for the context…”
“What it’s like to experience Polar Night in the world’s Northernmost town.”
Cecilia Blomdahl writes about her embrace of the seasonal plunge into total darkness and also posts videos from her eight years in Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
LEARNING FROM HISTORY
David Ferry
They said, my saints, my slogan-sayers sang,
Be good, my child, in spite of all alarm.
They stood, my fathers, tall in a row and said,
Be good, be brave, you shall not come to harm.
I heard them in my sleep and muttering dream,
And murmuring cried, How shall I wake to this?
They said, my poets, singers of my song,
We cannot tell, since all we tell you is
But history, we speak but of the dead.
And of the dead they said such history
(Their beards were blazing with the truth of it)
As made of much of me a mystery.
Travel Between The Pages 