I had an appointment in Room 217 at the New York Public Library (NYPL). This is the place where books located ‘off-site’ are brought to researchers. I had emailed ahead of time and placed an order to read two books: the Egyptian Diaries of one of the characters in my novel from his trip in 1869 and 1873; and Memorials of the Royal Yacht Squadron published in 1902. I knew the Egyptian Diaries - a transcribed account of a trip down the Nile - was one of only two available in the U.S. library system; I thought the Royal Yacht book, which I found while researching the NYPL catalogue, was just as rare.


I walked into room 217 to wait in line with the others to fulfill my order. The young lady working the counter appeared casually dressed given the ostentatious nature of the room she worked in. Strategically placed narrow brass stairs led to the upper catwalks where books were once stored. Indeed, the walls around Room 217 were lined floor to ceiling with brass shelving fixtures, empty, and abandoned. I tried to imagine the previous clientele, scanning the shelves for books needed to construct dissertations; books only found in Room 217. It is was that kind of place: these hallowed shelves hosted ghosts.

When I got to the counter I told the librarian my name, handed her my card and waited while she unceremoniously checked my request in the computer system and without a word or smile, left me while she walked through a door to retrieve my books. Maybe I was expecting too much but wasn’t she just as excited as I was to have her hands on these treasures that only the NYPL and maybe one other library in the whole nation holds in its collection?

My excitement grew when she placed the box, tied with a shoe string in my hand: the first edition of the Memorials of the Royal Yacht Squadron. Inside was a first hand account of the founding of the squadron and the social life of 19th century yacht enthusiasts who flocked to the Isle of Wight in the UK.

In the past few years of conducting research for my novel I have handled a lot of old documents: letters written in cursive in the 1860s; court documents that were so brittle I was afraid they would crack and crumble in my hands; and small leather-bound diaries that have outlasted the mold and mildew of an Adirondack winter. But this book was different.

It was tied up in a preservation box and when I untied the string and opened it I found a note prominently displayed telling me to BE CAREFUL, the book was fragile. I delicately propped the book in a V and pulled out my digital camera to take pictures of the pages I thought would be most useful. And I found more than I had time to capture with my camera: a descriptive narrative only a sailor could write on the 1851 win of the yacht America, which led to the famous  America’s Cup race; photos of Commodore King Edward VII; sketches of people promenading at the landing site for the yachts; and pithy quips such as this one about prevalence of blackballing in the 1890s:

“It is precisely this black balling that makes the club to be so highly considered as it is, for in England the test of superiority is not looked for in actual worth of the thing, but in the number of people who can be prevented from enjoying it.”

The flash went off on the first picture I took with my digital camera. I glanced around to see if anyone had noticed my indiscretion and adjusted the camera settings to flash-off. I then proceeded to take pictures of at least twenty pages, only stopping when I found some passage that fascinated me. I fumbled with my camera, almost causing a small tear in a page. I blushed, glanced around again. Nobody noticed, thank God.

Then I came to end of the book and the section I had been looking for - a list of the yachts. Wouldn’t you know the one yacht I was looking for was inside the one page in the whole book that had not been split open! Nineteenth century books had pages folded as folios and people opened (some say cut) the pages as they read. Just my luck the page was hidden, uncut, and I wasn’t going to be the one to do slit it open.

Feeling and probably looking like an idiot, I placed my head sideways on the massive table and pushed the fold of the page lightly with my finger to squeeze it open enough so I could peer into the interior at the printed list of yachts. What a pain. The young man sitting next to me stopped typing in his laptop and gave me a sidewise glance. I ignored him.


Then I started to panic. I had to meet someone in less than an hour and I had spent so much time with this old book that I hadn’t even gotten to the Egyptian Diaries. Reluctantly I put the book in its preservation box thinking maybe I would come back one day and read it properly. I turned my attention to the rest of my research.

I got home and downloaded the pictures and was mortified to find they were all fuzzy. When I turned off the flash I must have messed with the other settings, including the little one that shows a hand waving, which means: turn on to reduce blurriness from shaky hands. Dammit!

I live hours away from the New York Public Library  and knew it would be weeks before I got back to New York City. My only consolation was that I took great notes. While I despondently deleted the pictures from my camera, only salvaging a few, I thought I better look up the book again so I could find the publisher’s name. Instead of going to the NYPL catalog I just typed the book title into a Google search and up came a link - the book, digitized on Project Gutenberg.

Yes, every page of that wonderful book, preserved for anyone to read at their leisure, online, available for downloading as a pdf. And none of the pages were blurry.
 
The ghosts of Room 217 were laughing at me.

One of the settings in my novel is at a racecourse in Brighton, UK, in the 1890s. As I am unfamiliar with the setting and the culture of thoroughbred racing, I had to scout down some lore about horses, racing, betting, and the Brighton racecourse. I started by reading Dick Francis novels set in England. These are mysteries steeped in racing culture by an ex-champion jockey, but set in contemporary time periods. I then found a historical romance novel written by Rosalind Laker in 1978 set in the early 19th Century titled: Ride the Blue Riband. This book helped me understand the culture of the horse trading and betting and the rogues that inevitably get involved in such ventures.
 
But the real gem came when I found a book on the internet titled: The Brighton Races, written and published by Jim Beavis in 2003 that looked like it might provide everything I needed to write my scenes at the Brighton race tracks. Coincidentally, my critique partner happens to live in Brighton and was able to track the book down because it was not available to purchase online.
 
Brighton was always a tourist destination due to its proximity to the sea, but because of the excellent turf and the Prince of Wales’ fascination with the place, it became a popular racing venue in 1783. This was the year the race track made the racing calendar and royalty brought their horses there to race. The Prince of Wales became a regular visitor, bringing with him his court. The curious onlookers inevitably followed.
 
The race track fell in and out of favor from the 1820s on, but in its heyday, Brighton race track was the place to be for gentlemen and ladies. They would wear their finery and promenade along the grass lawn below the stands prior to the races. The consecutive races in Goodwood, Lewes, and Brighton were called the “Sussex Fortnight” and was a regular part of the social season for aristocrats and thoroughbred owners.
 
This historical account is full of colloquial gems I would never have been able to discover on my own. These included local news accounts of the scoundrels of the day, “welshers” as they were called, who took bets from unwitting “punters” and ran off with their money while the victims watched the race. According to Beavis, these scammers would offer better odds on the horses than other bookmakers to lure in their victims in. “Nobbling” horses that were favored to win by drugging them or their jockeys was another ploy used by criminals to win bets placed on horses with higher odds.
 
There were so many race tracks during the Victorian era that they became a breeding ground for these types of illicit activities. Particularly for Brighton, the railroad heralded a new era for the race track. A new heyday for Brighton began when Londoners and other tourists could make it to Brighton by train, the racecourse drew crowds of up to 30,000. The local newspaper kept track of the petty crimes by reporting them in the section of the newspaper called “Race Hill Cases”: stories of pickpockets, rowdies, and robbery of local establishments.
 
The tracks became a scapegoat for the crimes that had nothing to do with horse racing but because they attracted people in organized crime. Gangs became commonplace by World War One. When, in 1934, a large trunk was found at the Brighton station with the body parts of a woman, Brighton was dubbed “the queen of slaughtering places” instead of its nickname “the queen of watering places”.  Beavis speculates that Graham Greene drew his inspiration for his famous 1947 novel Brighton Rock from the gang warfare that had its beginnings at the racecourse.
 
Since World War Two the race course at Brighton has had some ups and downs. By the 1990s it was in disrepair and needed a major facelift, which it received in 1998. It now hosts the popular Ladies Day with prizes for the best dressed ladies. Things have indeed come full circle.