Here Is New York.

New York: The Curtis Publishing Company, 1949. First edition of this classic meditation on the City of New York. Octavo, original cloth, frontispiece. Presentation copy, signed by the author on the front free endpaper, "E.B. White Dec. 1949." Presented above by Katherine White, "Merry Christmas from the Whites." White was a writer and wife of the author. She was the fiction editor for The New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 1960. In 1977, William Shawn wrote, "More than any other editor except Harold Ross himself, Katharine White gave The New Yorker its shape, and set it on its course." Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. An exceptional example, most rare and desirable signed and inscribed by both White's. Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, E.B. White's stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America's foremost literary figures. The New York Times has named Here is New York one of the ten best books ever written about the metropolis, and The New Yorker calls it "the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city. Written during the summer of 1948, well after the author and editor had taken up permanent residence in Maine, Here Is New York is a fond glance back at the city of his youth, when White was one of the "young worshipful beginners" who give New York its passionate character. It's also a tribute to the sheer implausibility of the place--the tangled infrastructure, the teeming humanity, the dearth of air and light. Much has changed since White wrote this essay, yet in a city "both changeless and changing" there are things here that will doubtless ring equally true 100 years from now. To wit, "New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience--if they did they would live elsewhere."