My New Orleans Odyssey 2.0
Just some notes from my unique and solitary way of appreciating NOLA
Note to reader: past articles in this newsletter are embedded in the following text because they relate to things that I discuss in this new article. If you want simply keep reading the new article, just keep scrolling past these embeds. The embeds are there to connect present and past, which is something (as you know if you’ve been following me for a while) I am wont to do.
Start on Royal St.
Around the corner, right on Bienville, past the perfume shop that tickles the nose delightfully
Onwards with purpose, destination: Crescent City Books
I look at the books in the window first
Edgar Allen Poe, Walter Scott, and picture books on local themes emphasizing the old New Orleans essence….
Anyway….
In the store, very cold—a welcome reprieve from the humidity, so bad not only for the humans but for the books too, and books like to be cold—and the gentleman on duty at the sales desk greets me with quiet, unobtrusive friendliness…. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it is a relief to be understood on this point. I’m coming here, after all, to be contemplative among the books. Just here to browse, I say demurely, and I’m sure he gets that all the time. Who comes here to do anything else? Alas, what do I know? I’m not in the book business.1 I’m just a public-service librarian.
It’s not very crowded, and the few drop-ins are relatively brief. I linger, however. I want to look at every book, if I can. The art prints too. Beautiful color sketches, Parisian magazine reprints from turn of the century—19th to 20th, naturally. I flip through them all, slowly, pausing to consider buying a couple of them—a beautiful lady reading a book in a tree, for instance, impervious, and oblivious, it seems, to the boy standing awkwardly below.
The books in the locked cases are the truly awesome objects to behold. Histories from England and France, first editions, multiple volume accounts of Napoleon Bonaparte, poets, kings and queens! I am struck by the 11-volume series on the poetry of Swinburne. (Just like in my first NOLA odyssey, I’m thinking much about Helene Hanff, having begun to savor her classic 84 Charing Cross Road on Audible during the drive down here. Swinburne doesn’t get a mention in the book, but that is a technicality of no importance. It’s the spirit of the place that evokes the novel. More on that later.) There is a tome of The Life of Goldsmith. The four-volume set of the Complete Works of Oliver Goldsmith was not there (sold, alas, for $375 since I beheld it in July 2022, during my previous Odyssey—(https://heavycrownpress.substack.com/p/my-new-orleans-odyssey)—during which I had purchased an 1834 edition of Walton’s Lives, $125, because it has a Jefferson College Library sticker on the inside of the front cover. My great-grandfather, Edgar Anthony Coco, Jr., studied there for a time. Uncle Frank tried telling me I was wrong about that; having only spoken to relatives about Edgar’s life, and having never read Edgar’s Jefferson College sports journal as I did, he naturally would assume I had made an error. I think my late cousin, Sheldon Roy, may be the only other person who picked up on this interesting detail about Edgar. Anyway, when I came across the Walton’s Lives tome that had actually been part of the 19th century college’s library, I had to have it. I like to think, for my own amusement, that the book still sat on the shelves there when Edgar was enrolled, circa 1923/1924. And shortly after Edgar left the St. James Parish school to study at Spring Hill, Jefferson College closed down forever. Today, it operates as a Jesuit retreat.) I have a bookmark that I keep in this tome; it is a picture of three out of four of Edgar’s children, including my grandmother, Louise Coco Schneider, smiling out at the photographer from a booth at Lake Pontchartrain.)
I observe that Dilke’s two-volume Greater Britain is still on the shelves at Crescent City Books, two summers after that first Odyssey, and in the same spot if I remember correctly, tucked neatly among the rare English and French histories. Dilke is always interesting to me because one of my own published works is the annotated Heavy Crown Edition of his fictional (and, I think, under appreciated) satire, The Fall of Prince Florestan of Monaco By Himself.
Oh! The best item in CCB right now? In the glass case that is the sales desk, there is a massive, heavy, and leather-bound edition of Wuthering Heights, illustrated by Balthus (more than $4,000 is the price tag on the inside)!!! I did not want the gentleman at the desk to remove it, but he did before I had a chance to say I’m not in the market for it. “I can’t buy that,” I said, not wanting him to bother disturbing its pages for little ol’ me! “It’s free to look at,” he said with a smile.
“Oh?”
And he opened it for me! He proceeds to do what I could never do—casually, calmly turn the pages! I myself to touch the cover once. I quickly retreated, hating the thought of my oily fingers on its untainted surface. Horror! I’m a librarian who for the past three years (give or take) worked in a special collection with a closet full rotting rare books—much, much older ones than this Balthus, but still even less precious. (For most of my life, Jane Eyre was my favorite Brontë-Sister novel, but after reading Withering Heights last year, that changed!) This is all reminding me of my article from September 2022, about the Crown Jewels, where I discuss, among other things, like Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, the especially antiquated treasure that is the Morgan Beatus:
The Crescent City Books offering of Wuthering Heights Balthus is a 1993 limited edition, and, as the gentleman informs me, only about 300 copies were made, and Balthus signed each copy, and it is kept in a special box. Crescent City Books is selling their copy for I forgot exactly how much—upwards of $4,000, I think! But a google search just revealed another copy of the same edition for sale (*only* $4500) at AbeBooks.com. Or maybe that is the same copy, the listing belonging to Crescent City Books, perhaps?
I did consider buying a neat little graphic novel adapted from George Orwell’s 1984. That is another favorite story, which I’ve read more times than I can count anymore. Needless to say, not all the books here are antiquarian. Far from it. There are plenty of non-scary, modern, and mainstream-interest books, like Michelle Obama’s Becoming, and familiar paperback copies of widely beloved fiction, both contemporary and classic. There is plenty of Jane Austen and Victor Hugo on the shelves, but there are also books by Umberto Eco. I end up buying, along with a Crescent City Books reusable bag:
1. 1896 edition of Louisiana, by Frances Hodgson Burnett ($125)
2. Terra Firma, poems by Thomas Centolella (a $3 paperback)
3. To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf (a 2023 copy in a teal-colored cloth binding that cost $14.99)
Crescent City Books, I suppose, is my own 84 Charing Cross Road. Except I’m not locked in a charming, postwar, transatlantic correspondence with the….[whatever Frank Doel was to 84 CCR]? Does Crescent City Books even have a Frank Doel equivalent? (That’s the Anthony Hopkins role, if you’ve only seen the movie.) Besides the man at the sales desk, there were two men walking around, seeming to be employed there. They had access to a door at the back, near the George Orwell graphic novel, perhaps a refuge within the refuge where books and art prints get processed, temporarily stored, employees take breaks, take out the trash, and handle correspondence.
I walk up Chartres, take a left on Conti, and just wander around the block that is taken up by the enormous Louisiana Supreme Court. [The only thing I know intimately about that venerable institution is that its law library, the Law Library of Louisiana, has a fantastic online libguide on the digitized Acts of Legislature. For my MLIS Capstone, I made a finding aid on all the Louisiana Acts of Legislature, complete with a Table of Contents and QR codes to digitized Acts, and notes on in-the-library physical copies.] Then I end up on Royal St. again, and when I come to the HNOC—Historic New Orleans Collection—I timidly step inside. I know about it, of course, HNOC just being one of those places that a librarian in Louisiana comes to know about, hear about, and (reverentially) refer to on occasion. Although New Orleans is in the name for the collection, don’t make the common mistake of thinking there is nothing about the rest of Louisiana in the exhibits. One of many things HNOC does well is to connect Louisiana cultures. All the parts come together in the whole and so, the exhibit, which is distributed on three floors, reflects the artistic, economic, and political character of the state. Growing up in Louisiana, I never could wrap my head around all the bayous and swamps and lakes that flow along the bottom of the Boot. New Orleans, though, was a tiny island in my mind, a place without anchor—a place to drop in during Mardi Gras and never think of the rest of the year. Only now am I learning to appreciate the way all of Louisiana runs through it via the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain causeway—and vice versa, I guess. New Orleans is in Louisiana, of course, but more than that, Louisiana, in a sense, grew out of New Orleans, and flows back to it, so that it’s all one.
Step through the HNOC doors and be greeted at once by a staff that is ready for you. They want you to come in, come learn about their collected and ongoing research, restoration, and preservation. Come learn about Louisiana—about the courtyard that used to be an artist colony of sorts, about the cypress trees, about the prior owner of the HNOC house2 who bought the church organ showcased in one of its rooms, and about the many marginalized communities who found solace in numbers on the streetcars….Oh! A Streetcar Named Desire is evoked in the exhibit, reminding us that Tennessee Williams came to New Orleans from an unhappy previous life in Missouri to join what he termed “the last frontier of Bohemia,” a place where immigrants and LGBTQIA and African Americans alike mixed it up culturally, how they coped, how they expressed, how they sometimes did thrive against the odds. (Tennessee Williams, and especially A Streetcar Named Desire, is evoked everywhere in the French Quarter. The very hotel where I stayed has many glass cases full of objects, like typewriters and writing instruments, used by the writers who hung out there—Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, William Faulkner….) Diversity thrives at HNOC, as in New Orleans. For instance, there is mention in the exhibit of the Upstairs Lounge, a hangout on Iberville St. favored by what we call in modern parlance the LGBTQIA communities.3 A fire at the Upstairs Lounge in 1973 killed 32 people and galvanized a spirit of compassion and sense of togetherness among LGBTQIA people in New Orleans.
From the gift shop at HNOC, I walk to the address of the upstairs apartment once lived in by Tennessee Williams. Apparently, this was not the only place he ever lived in the city. There is a plaque at the 722 Toulouse building to mark one of many spots where he did rest his head and where it is known that he wrote the short story, “The Angel in the Alcove.” The plaque was placed there in 2011 to mark the centennial of his birth—March 26, 1911—as well as the 25th anniversary of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. The playwright—best known for plays that went to Broadway and became Hollywood films, like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie—looms large in his beloved French Quarter. The HNOC purchased and restored the building at 722 Toulouse.
I’m not a NOLA girl. Baton Rouge might not exactly be the Outer Rim Territories—at least it’s not Shreveport, aho!—but it is still as different from New Orleans as night from day. I guess you could say that about lots of places. Every place has its own flavor, and New Orleans is unique in how it mashes together flavors from other places (like the Spanish architecture in the French Quarter, Italian gelato, and French macarons) and yet, weirdly, even the influences that came from the outside end up manifesting in ways that can only be expressed in New Orleans. The truth is, though, that I’m not even really from Baton Rouge. I was transplanted there by my family when I was three years old, but I was born in Alexandria—no, not Egypt—Rapides Parish. My parents were Marksville kids. My grandmother Louise was a Marksville philanthropist. That might not mean much to anyone not related to her (I’m not delusional) but I think it’s awesome, and I’m very proud that she played such a leading role in bringing so much musical theatre and summer arts programs to her small town in central Louisiana!
I guess lots of people feel like aliens in their families? I don’t know. Maybe some do. I certainly did. And yet, unlike others in my genealogical chart, my grandmother never made me feel that I had anything to be ashamed about. She loved me, she understood me—because she wanted to love me and understand me. She lay in bed with me and guided me through prayers—in fact, informal rambling about all the people we wanted God to bless. She slapped her legs and giggled and beckoned me over; I ran to put myself in her lap and kiss her soft cheek and smell her….a smell that clung to her clothes, a few items of which I took with me after she died, and yes, the smell lingered for years, and I vividly recall the heaviness in my heart when I realized that the smell wasn’t there anymore. In my most precious memory of her, we are sitting on her bed, talking about the classical composers and the founding fathers.
The penultimate day of my Odyssey was Sunday. I began it with coffee and the Lobster Benedict at the Criollo restaurant. What I love most about this restaurant, which is part of the Hotel Monteleone, are the glass cases of mementoes that belonged to and old, beautiful hardback copies of books that were written by the great writers who stayed there. I left the hotel in an uber (a Lexus!) bound for the Sanger Theatre to see Clue. The 1985 film is one of my favorites. I got hooked on it as a child because one of my friends, Johanna across the street, became obsessed with everything British. Anytime I’d go to her house, she was likely to be watching either Clue or the BBC Sherlock Holmes starring Jeremy Brett. I never much cared for the latter, but as I grew up, Clue just became one of my go-to’s for comfort. The punchy dialogue are genius. I love Colonel Mustard (“This is war, Peacock!”) but Mrs. White’s lines are my favorite. I could transcribe them here, but the typed words just don’t have the same effect as Madeline Kahn’s performance! Anyway, I was fascinated but very surprised by the stage adaptation of Jonathan Lynn’s screenplay, written by the contemporary playwright Sandy Rustin. The play was highly entertaining. There was never a dull moment as the actors ran around the stage. I have to give special mention to Lee Savage for set design and Jeff Human for sound design. The visual and sound effects were incredible! The movement too!
After the show, I took another uber to the Faulkner House Books. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that I took the ride to the unnamed alley that runs parallel between Royal and Jackson Square, straight into Pirate’s Alley. If I had to stepped out of the car and walked straight through that unnamed alley to Pirate’s Alley, and turned left…. Well, that’s not what I did…not at first. I walked past the cut through to Pirate’s Alley, turned off St. Peter’s St. and right on Royal, and right again onto Pirate’s Alley, which smells like urine, and I walked right past the Faulkner House Books, and made the loop back to the spot where I began. I had to ask someone in a shop where might the Faulkner House Books be. He was very amused: “It’s right there. Go left out of here, and left again on Pirate’s Alley, and it’s right there!” Indeed. Indeed, it was! Right there! Silly me! One thing led to another. The woman on duty in the bookstore (maybe she’s the owner, I don’t know; she knows a lot, like she knew exactly where to find the short stories by Tennessee Williams that I was looking for. They were not in the spot where the other Tennessee Williams books were. She found it in, like, 2 minutes, and it was exactly what I was looking for: eleven short stories by TW, one of which being “The Angel in the Alcove,” which is mentioned on the plaque at 722 Toulouse because it was written there. She said, “Oh yes, and he wrote Streetcar right around the corner from here.” She gave me the address: 632 St. Peter’s St. I found this second Williams residence without much difficulty, but as you’ve already seen, I do occasionally dance around the obvious! I would have gone back to the hotel from there (for I had two indie-author Zoom interviews to get ready for) but just as I pointed my feet in the direction of the hotel, it began to rain. And I do mean, pour down rain. So I slipped inside the restaurant I happened to be right next to: Tableau, a restaurant run by Dickie Brennan & Co. I did not know anything about this place, but my discovery of it turned out to be a happy accident! There were not many customers in at the time. Well, it was 3 o’clock. I thought, well, why not have an early dinner and just eat something light later? So that’s what I did. I ordered one of their specials: seasonal seafood pasta, the seasonal at the moment being crab.
I was pleased to see that right next door from Tableau is Le Petit Theatre. Sean Hayes fans must be excited about Good Night, Oscar going to Le Petit Theatre from January 9-26, 2025.
Back at the hotel, I had a drink at the Carousel bar. Yes, it really moves around and around. Slowly, thank god, very slowly—although, I still felt that it must be challenging for the bartenders. I can’t imagine successfully pouring and mixing drinks on a moving carousel. It was still Happy Hour and I ordered an old fashioned. I talked to a nice lady to my right; she was very interested in the fact that I’m a librarian and we discussed, what else, books. I just had the one drink and then went upstairs, to the tenth floor, to get ready for my author interviews.
Crescent City Books are in the book business, like Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) in You’ve Got Mail, directed by Nora Ephron, 1998. And Meg Ryan replies, “I am in the book business.” Oh, yes, Fox concedes in a sarcastic tone. “I see, and we're the Price Club. Only instead of a ten-gallon can of olive oil for $3.99 that won't even fit into your kitchen cabinet, we're selling cheap books. Me a spy. Absolutely. I have in my possession the secret printout of the sales figures of a bookstore so inconsequential and yet [so] full of its own virtue that I was instantly compelled to rush over and check it out for fear it would drive me out of business.” I could not resist injecting a bit of the delightful Hanks/Ryan banter from the movie, but I’m not making any comparison between the real-life Crescent City Books and the fictional Shop Around the Corner. Interestingly, CCB seems on firm ground, business wise, and probably because they mix the two markets—rare and accessible, specialized and mainstream—together. Alas, I repeat, I know nothing about the book business!
There was actually a long list of owners of the HNOC building prior to its current-day non-profit use for cultural and historical restoration and preservation. One of those owners, about mid-20th century, was the local NBC affiliate where worked the likes of Dick van Dyke.
I like to say communities, plural, instead of clumping all those represented in one basket. I agree with Bill Maher that sometimes our admirable desire to be more inclusive can be taken too far; too much community, after all, obfuscates the beauty of individual uniqueness.