Join NYRB Classics at the “Classics and Coffee Club”

Over at tumblr, “A Different Stripe: Notes from NYRB Classics” is inviting everyone to partake in its “Classics and Coffee Club.” Here’s the invite: “Do you have a picture of an NYRB Classic with a cup of coffee or tea? Send it to this address and we’ll post it here (making you an honorary member of the Classics and Coffee Club). And let us know where you bought or borrowed your book from. We would love to shout out bookstores and libraries.” They aren’t fussy. Later on they admit they’ll take a photo of a book with a cup of tea or – what the hell – vodka or beer or a hot toddy. How, in fact, do they know that’s coffee in my photo above, and not, say, Jamaica rum?

It sounds like fun. We’ve interviewed NYRB Classics founder and editorial director Edwin Frank before here, and we’re awfully fond of managing editor Sara Kramer, too. Most of the photos on the tumblr site are accompanied by a quote from the photographed book about coffee (or tea or vodka, etc.) – such as this one: “Of course, we always drank coffee, no matter what the weather,” from Nescio‘s “Insula Dei,” in Amsterdam Stories, translated by Damion Searls. We post that photo below, because we can’t turn down the chance to add another book cat to our gallery. This one is a half-Siamese at Haymarket Café in Northampton, MA. (I couldn’t find a coffee quote to go with the tweet I sent for Vassily Grossman‘s Life and Fate, but I rather liked this one: “”Life’s grace and charm can never be erased by the powers of destruction…”)

Exactly what the club will do I don’t know, but I’m sure the imaginative folks at NYRB Classics will think of something. Meanwhile, check out some of the photos here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2014 at 9:27 pm by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.