The staff of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen’s Library, on West Forty-fourth Street in New York City, always seem to be holding in reserve any arcane book I need, no matter how long it takes me to show up: the last “due date” on Commodore Sands’s autobiography, before I charged it out in 1996, was December 11, 1912. From the General Society’s stacks came the basis for my version of the Mangin projector, illustrated in The Electric Light: Its History, Production and Applications (New York, 1884). I apologize to the librarians for having allowed Alfred R. Conkling’s Life and Letters (1889) of his uncle Roscoe to fall apart in my hands.
Among the scores of contemporary books that have proved important to this one, I would like to make special mention of four: Thomas C. Reeves’s Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975); David M. Jordan’s Roscoe Conkling of New York (Cornell University Press, 1971); Mary Mitchell’s Chronicles of Georgetown Life (1986); and Mary Cable’s The Blizzard of ’88 (Atheneum, 1988).
I’m grateful to Dr. Santina Siena for help with nineteenth-century obstetrics, and to Dr. Barry Goldstein for assistance with trigonometry.
I owe many thanks to Dan Frank, my editor, who has made the last five years of my writing life the most pleasurable I’ve known.
Andrea Barrett provided wisdom, books (including George B. Wood’s 1855 Treatise on the Practice of Medicine), and chapter-by-chapter readings as shrewd as they were gentle; she has my thanks and love.
I’m grateful to my agent, Mary Evans, and her associate Tanya McKinnon; to my sharp-eyed, faithful readers Lucy Kaylin and Frances Kiernan; and to Gore Vidal, il miglior fabbro, for conversation about historical fiction.
I’m also grateful—more than ever—to Bill Bodenschatz.
Westport, Connecticut
June 17, 1999
Two Moons Page 33
