Dorothea von Moltke and Cliff Simms at home in Princeton.
Labyrinth’s Founding Family
By Wendy Greenberg | Photography by Andrew Wilkinson
“Lo the Poor Bookseller,” H. L. Mencken wrote in a 1930 essay: “The marvel is, indeed that [the bookseller] ever survives at all. It is as if a haberdasher, in addition to meeting all the hazards of the current fashion, had to keep in stock a specimen of every kind of shirt, collar, sock, necktie, and undershirt in favor since 1750.”
The picture of the underappreciated bookseller was brushed up when Jeff Deutsch wrote in the introduction to his 2022 book, In Praise of Good Bookstores: “The good bookstore’s collection comprises books that might have been published a month ago, a year ago, a half century ago, a couple of millennia ago. The attuned bookseller must provide a selection of books of all vintages.” more
“In The Lorax I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might,” said Dr. Seuss of his favorite book. In a 1990 interview with Publishers Weekly, Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991) admitted “I was a preacher in that book, but I got away with it by disguising the message.”
I’m looking at two photographs. In one my father is sitting with our first cat on his lap, a Siamese male named Kiloo, pronounced “kee-oo.” The small, framed photo occupies a shelf on this desk with an unframed one of me half a century later slouched on the living room sofa with our tuxedo cat, Dizzy, on my lap. Kiloo is poised, as if planning another attack on the clawed-to-rags arms of the living room sofa. Not Dizzy. He’s the picture of contentment, one big white “this-is-mine” paw on my leg. I thought of Kiloo as soon as I opened The Big New Yorker Book of Cats (Random House 2013), where the first thing you see is a full-page color photograph of the cat-clawed arm of a sofa — minor damage compared to the havoc wreaked by Kiloo. 
A year before the invasion of Ukraine, I said in the Fall/Winter 2021 Book Scene that while I’d never actually been to Russia, I lived through “a St. Petersburg summer” in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and spent “my first Russian winter” reading The Brothers Karamazov. The phrasing suggests a naive belief in a literary realm beyond time, space, and politics, a land of no boundaries when, in fact, the novels I was reading were American editions published in New York. 
In her introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition of Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, literary critic Elaine Showalter calls it her “most ambitious novel,” in which she “uncannily channels” Marilyn Monroe’s “inner voice and demands that the star be given recognition, compassion, and respect.”
