The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,14

Joseph Conrad, B. Traven, G. K. Chesterton, and Arthur Conan Doyle. He liked chase scenes, confrontations aboard tall ships or fast-moving trains. When he first started trying to write seriously, he imitated the stories he was reading, wrote penny dreadfuls, fast-paced thrillers, tales that whipped by so fast the pages practically turned themselves. He gave his stories mysterious, evocative titles—“A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross”; “It’s Always Darkest Just Before the Kill.” In every one of his stories there were treasure maps, plot twists, and clues; his chapters were short, and every one ended on a suspenseful scheherazade. He said he was a fast writer; he figured he could make a living cranking out one story after another.

But after he’d begun submitting the stories to prominent literary agents and publishers, he received just about the opposite responses that I tended to receive regarding mine—there was too much going on in his work. Sure, the stories were entertaining and suspenseful, but they didn’t speak to contemporary society or the human condition. Given all there was to write about in the modern world, who still wanted to read about buried treasure or prospectors digging for gold? Roth needed to draw on his own experiences and observations.

Roth said he had never thought of writing from his own experience; to him, writing a story was supposed to be about making something up. He had never considered reading to understand more about the human condition; reading was all about escaping it.

Disheartened, Roth spent hours when he wasn’t working wandering the streets of Manhattan searching for modern stories, adventures with contemporary settings. He felt hopelessly out of date; maybe he had been born in the wrong era. The stories he read in newspapers concerned property crimes, home invasions, bribery scandals, and all that was too dull, depressing, and real. He truly wanted to write swashbucklers and Westerns, but there were no pirates doing battle on the East River, no cowboys riding horseback on the Central Park bridle paths, no treasure maps in Riverside Park. Nowhere could he detect any glint of buried gold. He placed a few stories in obscure journals and men’s magazines, published some in anthologies with titles such as Fantastic Yarns and Unknown Tales, but the most he ever made from his writing was fifty bucks.

The Blom Library on Lexington Avenue and East Thirty-third Street had once been the property of Chester Blom, an early-twentieth-century railroad magnate and collector of manuscripts and East Asian art. The dusty and mildewed reading room of the Blom Library was filled with seemingly priceless curiosities—Shakespeare folios, letters the Bard wrote to Anne Hathaway, obscure Gospels written on parchment, codexes of the Comte de Graal, original letters written by Cicero, Rousseau, Goethe, and Voltaire. The Blom’s most prominently displayed possession was a rare and precious bound copy of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, an eleventh-century illustrated version of the classic book that had been used by professional readers who performed Murasaki’s tale before wealthy spectators, many of whom were unable to read. Genji was a thousand-page epic concerning the loves and travails of the eponymous son of a Japanese emperor. It was considered by many to be the world’s first novel and the foundation of modern fiction, and this manuscript was its earliest-known surviving exemplar. The book, with its stained leather cover, adorned with gold filigree, and opened to its exquisite, first illustrated page, which depicted Genji’s birth, was displayed in a glass case in the reading room. The character of Genji was nicknamed the “Shining Lord” for his beauty, and the shimmering gold leaf on this book’s cover inspired its own nickname—the “Shining Lord Manuscript.”

Chester Blom’s widow, Cecille, had willed the library and its collection to a private foundation that was run by her heirs, to be used solely for the study of its contents. The library and its reading room were open to members of the Blom family and to scholars and writers who successfully completed a detailed application and paid a five-hundred-dollar annual membership fee. One evening, while walking south on Lexington toward the bookstore where he was working at the time, Roth looked through the library’s windows, saw the reading room’s green desk lamps and its sagging bookshelves, and, immediately after entering, applied to become a member.

“An odd place, that Blom Library,” Roth told me as he sipped his beer, clearly relishing his memory of the place. The Blom collection was bizarre not only for its contents, Roth said, but for the