The Lions of Fifth Avenue: A Novel

AUTHOR’S NOTE

While I enjoy researching the history of each building I write about, the stories and characters are fictional, and with this book, especially, I took great liberties with the security procedures and organizational policies of the New York Public Library. For over a hundred years, this beloved literary mecca has anchored my city and been a haven for its residents, and for that I’m truly grateful. The seven-room apartment inside the library, however, did exist, and for three decades was the home of the library’s superintendent, John H. Fedeler Sr., and his wife and three children. The family I write about in this book comes from my imagination, not from the historical record.

Several books helped me during my research, including The New York Public Library: The Architecture and Decoration of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, by Henry Hope Reed and Francis Morrone; Pulitzer’s School: Columbia University’s School of Journalism, 1903–2003, by James Boylan; American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, by Christine Stansell; The Book Thief and Thieves of Book Row, both by Travis McDade; Fighting for Life by S. Josephine Baker; Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy, by Judith Schwarz; Brothers: The Origins of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, by Lola L. Szladits; Top Cats: The Life and Times of the New York Public Library Lions, by Susan G. Larkin; The Story Collector, by Kristin O’Donnell Tubb; and The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. The Surviving Spinsterhood book was inspired by Marjorie Hillis’s Live Alone and Like It (I couldn’t resist including two of her utterly perfect chapter titles, “Solitary Refinement” and “Pleasures of a Single Bed”), and the article by Inez Haynes Gillmore mentioned in the novel was first published in the April 1912 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. For further reading on the Columbia University library heist that inspired my story, I recommend “Picking Up the Pieces,” by Jean W. Ashton, in The Strategic Stewardship of Cultural Resources: To Preserve and Protect, edited by Andrea T. Merrill.