In Columbus I was the guest of the Crichton Club, which meets with a guest speaker three times a year. I signed their ninety-eight-year-old guestbook on the same page as Henry Petroski, author of “The Pencil.”

In the afternoon, I got a tour of the Thurber House on Jefferson Avenue. The house was not here—or, rather, it had not been refurbished—when I was doing research for my master’s thesis on Thurber, circa 1976. It has a bookshop with T-shirts (and pencils!), period furniture and original Thurber art, crazy hybrid light fixtures (it was converting from gas to electricity), photos of visiting writers (Art Buchwald, Ian Sandy Frazier). In the bedroom is a typewriter that belonged to Thurber. In his closet scores of writers have signed their names (Adam Gopnik, Anna Quindlen, Simon Winchester).

Columbus is shape shifter. There’s a lot of public art. Residents complain that its paper, the Dispatch, has shrunk. It has the traditional format, reduced to a miniature tabloid.

I am grateful to whoever suggested afterward that we go to Thurber’s Bar for a nightcap. It is one of the nicest hotel bars I’ve ever been in. Grateful, too, to Katharine Moore and her friend Bill, who took me around, and to Mark Allen, who came straight from the ACES conference in Portland to my talk, which was mostly about crusty characters from olden days (mine) at The New Yorker). I wore my new semicolon pin.

Below: Thurber House porch, a Thurber typewriter, Thurber’s Bar (in the hotel where his mother and brother lived).

ThurberPorch

ThurberTypewriter

Thurber'sBar