The Stationers Guild

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, The Morgan Library & Museum  in midtown New York City will have on display a hand-drawn Valentine Day’s cartoon from poet  E.E. Cummings to Marion Morehouse. 

Without question, the Morgan Library is one of the great architectural and cultural treasures in New York.  A visit to this magnificent Museum is provides a historical and visual perspective of the great traditions of Western culture that, in my experience, is not matched by any other museum in the world with the possible exception of the Getty Museum on the West Coast. 

While I was first drawn to the Morgan Museum to see the illustrated manuscripts (see above), I have now become a “book junkie” that has fallen in love with the Morgan Library.  The beauty of this three-story wood library makes you want to settle in for a lifetime of reading.  Each volume tells a story far  beyond the actual words in the book.  For instance, where else in the world would the find Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther that was reportedly carried by Napoleon?   Where else can you see original music scores written by Mozart in his own hand and hand-written novels by the Bronte sisters?   The Morgan Library and Museum is a sacred place that inspires by its unique perspective on the rich traditions of Western culture.

In a delicious article, Alison Leigh Cowan of the New York Times writes of the many exhibits in the metro-area that will display memorable love letters and notes  to celebrate Valentine’s Day.  Ms. Cowan quotes Mark Twain as saying that ‘“The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter.  The writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.”

This year, as in year’s past, I will pen a short love note to my wife of near forty years for Valentine’s Day.  Like Mark Twain, those few hand-written words reflect a “limitless freedom of statement and expression” that no other form of communication can match.  This Valentine’s Day, why don’t you plan on doing the same.

Richard W. May
Therese Saint Clair