If it was going to hover around eight or ten degrees again, then I was going to get myself a pile of library books and hunker down tonight.  As always, I  left with an eclectic tower of books, treasures I hadn't been looking for. 

In search of a travel book by Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter, I also found Anne Lamott and, on the shelf just across the way, John Muir's Travels in Alaska. In the magazine rack, Bookmarks, Mental Floss and a well-thumbed Esquire. A smiling George Clooney on the cover. Who could resist? 

I found The Tao of Twitter, Fifty Years of American Poetry and perhaps the best find of all: Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton. It was the title that stopped me; what might this be? 

The  book was full of 400 photos of people from every borough and corner of New York taken by Stanton who, in his introduction, said he didn't buy his first camera until 2010. When he lost his job as a bond trader, he went from city to city taking pictures. Living in Chicago at the time, he went to New York, thinking he'd spend a week there taking photos of people but he returned and stayed, asking people all over New York if he could take their pictures. He  started a blog and everything just took off. 

The book is a revelation. 

Each picture is its own story but Stanton also includes a caption, often a couple of words like "seen in Soho." Other times it's a snippet of conversation, a description of the moment, a wry commentary, a story.  

He's stilled a moment in time and created his own beautiful snapshot of humanity. 

http://www.humansofnewyork.com/

The cold night drifted far off into the distance and I fell into the book.