I am writing this essay on the fifth floor of the New York Society Library: an eighteenth-century subscription library housed in an early twentieth-century townhouse on East Seventh-Ninth Street. I am writing on the fifth floor because the wood-paneled members’ room – easily the library’s most beautiful – does not allow keyboards. Beside me there is a genuinely dog-eared print book (George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, purchased from the Strand in my teens). My cellphone is at home, where a pot of scratch-made Georgian beans is simmering in my slow cooker.
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