Currently on the Calendar: Truly a Full Service Bookstore

As Art on the Block's release date of September 17th approaches, my calendar is filling up with invitations to read and sign copies of the book. I am particularly thrilled that my first event on the evening of publication is at The Corner Book Store on Madison Avenue and 93rd Street.

The Corner Bookstore and Palgrave Macmillan request the pleasure of your company for a reading by Ann Fensterstock author of Art on the Block Tracking the New York Art World from Soho to the Bowery, Bushwick and Beyond Tuesday, September 17th · 6:00 p.m.  Wine and Cheese Reception & Book Signing Will Follow the Reading RSVP: (212) 831-3554 or cornerbook@aol.com

The terrific staff there – whose impressive literary backgrounds are worth checking out on their website at http://cornerbookstorenyc.com/ – are all very old friends. As a twenty year resident of the Upper East Side this was my local independent bookstore from 1986 until 2006.

Throughout the 1980s Nick, Chris, Danielle and their colleagues kept my husband Lee and I supplied with the armfuls of good reading that is the luxury of couples-before-children.

The late '80s saw my purchasing profile change for copies of Good Night Moon and The Big Red Barn for our then-little girls Kate and Jane. Into the early 1990s we journeyed onwards to chapter books and high school reading lists.

In the mid '90s the staff calmly took my orders for such works as Painted Love: The Art of Prostitution in Nineteenth Century France – with no questions asked. My return to graduate school and an M.A. in Art History was, in fact, the answer.

Through the late '90s they remained equally discreet over Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Twentieth Century Art and Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power. It was at this point (for fear of a call to Social Services – Department of Unfit Motherhood) that I felt compelled to explain my Thesis on the art of the twentieth century fin-de-siecle.

When Art on the Block was first announced by Palgrave Macmillan in their spring catalogue, The Corner Book Store picked it up immediately and asked to be the first to offer it to my many good friends and old neighbors. Like a good marriage – things change but the perfect partner just keeps right up there with you.

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