Anniversary Finds

Thrift shopping is, for Tempestt, a second nature. For Anthony, it took some dragging to learn — first reluctantly, then willingly, then as a habit of his own. In the five years since he arrived in New York from France, he has been finding books: not every French book that crossed his path, only the ones that seemed to open something.

Nothing here was bought to complete a set. Some of these books are famous; one, a 1941 history of French émigrés who settled the wilderness of upstate New York, is stranger and better than famous. One isn't a book at all — a signed lithograph of two dancers, half Folies Bergère, half Lincoln Center, which is more or less the whole idea in a single frame.

This Bastille Day marks five years since Anthony's crossing. Nineteen finds mark what quietly accumulated in between: a bridge, built one secondhand bookstore at a time. On the anniversary, the house offers the bridge itself — not the idea of it, the actual, particular, well-worn shape it took.