A group of Capital Region "literary nerds" begin their literary tour in Manhattan at the Algonquin Round Table, where The New Yorker magazine was hatched by a group of witty and acerbic writers known as "the vicious circle."

Author and tour guide Kevin C. Fitzpatrick at 412 W. 47th St., where The New Yorker’s founding editors Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant held huge, raucous parties fueled by illicit booze during Prohibition.

Two dozen local writers and readers posed on the steps of the New York Public Library’s main building on 5th Avenue at 42nd Street during a literary tour of New York City co-sponsored by the NYS Writers Institute and the University at Albany Alumni Association.

"A Century of the New Yorker" featured original cartoons, letters and manuscripts from literary legends, and examined the evolution of the sophisticated magazine of culture and the literary arts.

“A Century of the New Yorker” spanned the entire third floor of the New York Public Library and both sides of the hallway were packed with hundreds of archival items.

A 1920s photo of The New Yorker co-founders Jane Grant and her husband Harold Ross. She was the first female reporter on the city desk of The New York Times. The couple met in France in World War II when Ross was an editor for the U.S. Army’s newspaper, Stars and Stripes.

The Olympia SG1 typewriters used by Lillian Ross and William Shawn in the 1950s. He was The New Yorker editor and she was a star profile writer. The two carried on a passionate love affair for decades, which they hid at the office.

Dorothy Parker, an acerbic wit and celebrated humorist in the early years of The New Yorker, jotted down with pencil and loopy cursive her list of “Unattractive Authors Whose Work I Admire.”

Parker’s list included the literary luminaries William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling.

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It was Parker, a poet, who gave us the oft-quoted rhyme: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

Parker did not need spectacles. Her clear-eyed assessments and flinty pronouncements float like champagne bubbles across the illuminating, entertaining and sweeping exhibit, “A Century of The New Yorker,” at the New York Public Library’s spectacular main building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street in Manhattan. The structure is famously watched over by Patience and Fortitude, the world-renowned marble lions.

I joined two dozen other local folks — “literary nerds” one of them........

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