New York City sights for book lovers

Docent Julie Chelminski leads visitors through the old catalog room of the New York Public Library‘s 100-year-old Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. She holds a book that shows what the cards in the old card catalog looked like.   (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

The iconic lions at the entrance to the New York Public Library have been known since the 1930s as Patience and Fortitude, nicknames coined by then-Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.   (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

The Strand Bookstore, founded in 1927, moved in the ‘50s to its current location at Broadway at 12th Street in Manhattan and endures by selling a vast inventory of new and used books.   (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Fred Bass, co-owner of Strand, is in his 80s, but still puts in hours at the shop.  (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Clerk Varrick Robinson’s coiffure adds color to the rare books section of Strand.  (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Argosy bookstore, now in its third generation of family ownership, stands at East 59th Street in midtown Manhattan and dates to 1925.   (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

The White Horse Tavern, where poet Dylan Thomas spent some of his last hours drinking heavily in 1953, endures on Hudson Street near 11th Street in Manhattan‘s Greenwich Village.   (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Artwork hanging inside White Horse Tavern depicts Thomas at the bar.  (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Manhattan‘s Algonquin Hotel, handy to Times Square, won fame as a gathering place for writers in the 1920s.   (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

The 60-room Library Hotel opened in 2001 at Madison Avenue and 41st Street, a few blocks from the New York Public Library. Its room arrangement mirrors the Dewey Decimal System.   (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)