Books in Brief: The Eight Million

The Eight Million, by Meyer Berger (Columbia, 334 pp., $30)

Columbia University Press has performed an estimable service in reissuing The Eight Million, originally published in 1942 and long out of print, but not out of demand. The author, Meyer Berger, wrote for the New York Times from 1928 until his death in 1959, and consistently produced work that is held up as a textbook example of seemingly effortless, light daily journalism. Collected here are 45 pieces full of wonder about New York. The author writes about looking through an old leather-bound police blotter dating from 1862; gives a brief history of the city’s municipal jail, The Tombs; visits a Harlem marijuana party; and noses about a spice mill. In one piece he relates how he “caught ink fever,” and concludes: “I was to devote my life to searching out the odd fish and the unfortunates in a city of several millions.” These included cartographers, panhandlers, gangsters, violin-makers who scavenged old buildings for appropriate material, diamond cutters, reclusive theater producers living in haunted houses, cops, and tugboat captains. Berger wrote in an almost perfect, elegiac prose about a New York that has vanished, and about a New York that will always exist—in much the same style as two of his approximate coevals, John McNulty and Joseph Mitchell, both of them also masters of the form, and both also out of print. The Eight Million makes for very mellow reading.

JM

About the Author

Joe Mysak

Featured Tags

The Eight Million, by Meyer Berger (Columbia, 334 pp., $30)

Columbia University Press has performed an estimable service in reissuing The Eight Million, originally published in 1942 and long out of print, but not out of demand. The author, Meyer Berger, wrote for the New York Times from 1928 until his death in 1959, and consistently produced work that is held up as a textbook example of seemingly effortless, light daily journalism. Collected here are 45 pieces full of wonder about New York. The author writes about looking through an old leather-bound police blotter dating from 1862; gives a brief history of the city’s municipal jail, The Tombs; visits a Harlem marijuana party; and noses about a spice mill. In one piece he relates how he “caught ink fever,” and concludes: “I was to devote my life to searching out the odd fish and the unfortunates in a city of several millions.” These included cartographers, panhandlers, gangsters, violin-makers who scavenged old buildings for appropriate material, diamond cutters, reclusive theater producers living in haunted houses, cops, and tugboat captains. Berger wrote in an almost perfect, elegiac prose about a New York that has vanished, and about a New York that will always exist—in much the same style as two of his approximate coevals, John McNulty and Joseph Mitchell, both of them also masters of the form, and both also out of print. The Eight Million makes for very mellow reading.