The trains from Greenwich still arrive at Grand Central Station, and Claudia would still complain to Jamie “that it is over forty blocks” from there to the museum, and Jamie would still complain about the price of bus fare (which now costs almost as much as the adult one-way train fare from Greenwich cost then). Olivetti no longer has a typewriter on a stand outside a building on Fifth Avenue. Olivetti no longer makes manual typewriters. (Does anyone?) The Donnell Branch Library on Fifty-third Street still caters to children—even though the card catalog Claudia and Jamie used has gone the way of the manual typewriter.
With the exception of one reader who wrote me a letter scolding me for writing that two kids could live on twenty-four dollars and forty-three cents for a whole week in New York City, I have not had anyone quibble about the cost of living. Most readers focus on their rent-free accommodation in the museum and recognize that these details—accurate for their time—are the verisimilitude that allow Claudia and Jamie to live beyond the exact details of life in 1967.
Since 1967, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has gotten bigger and busier and has put a new face on Fifth Avenue. Entrance was free then, and it isn’t now. There was a fountain in the restaurant then, and there isn’t now. The bed (picture on page 37) where Claudia and Jamie slept has been dismantled, and just last year they closed the little chapel where Claudia and Jamie said their prayers (page 88). Even so, for thirty-five years, the staff at the museum has been asked so many questions about this book that in the spring of last year, they devoted a whole issue of their publication MuseumKids to it. It is titled The “Mixed-up Files” Issue.
One dark and stormy night in October 1995, a teacher at New York University, an authority on sixteenth-century Italian sculpture, looked inside the glass door of the French Embassy’s cultural services building at 972 Fifth Avenue—practically across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There was a party going on, and there in the center of the lobby stood a three-foot marble statue of a youth. She had seen the statue before, but on this night the rotunda was brightly lighted, and she saw the statue in a new way. She studied the statue, she did a lot of research, and months later she announced to the world that the statue in the lobby is a cupid, an early work of Michelangelo.
“What’s the difference between an angel and a cupid?” Jamie inquired.
“Why?” Claudia asked.
“Because there’s a lost cupid for sure.”
“Angels wear clothes and wings and are Christian. Cupids wear bows and arrows; they are naked and pagan.” (page 73)
The statue in the lobby is naked. The statue in the lobby has a quiver of arrows. However, the arguments pro and con about its authenticity continue and exactly echo those that Mrs. Frankweiler speaks of on page 152.
On January 23, 1996, when the New York Times carried a front-page story about the cupid in the lobby, I got a lot of calls and letters asking me, Did I know about the statue when I wrote From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler? The answer is, I did not. I made up the story of Angel, prompted by a different story that appeared in the New York Times on October 25, 1965. That article announced that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had purchased at auction a plaster and stucco statue that dated from the time of the Renaissance. (Even in the days of twenty-cent bus fare, the purchase price of $225 was enough of a bargain that the acquisition made page-one news.) And that is the story that I adapted to my fiction. “Angel” became part of Claudia’s story about finding herself, about how the greatest adventure lies not in running away but in looking inside, and the greatest discovery is not in finding out who made a statue but in finding out what makes you.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art still does not own a piece of sculpture by Michelangelo, but to a whole generation of readers the “discovery” of the cupid in the lobby was a case of life imitating art.
I, too, have changed since 1967. When I wrote From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I was the mother of three living in a suburb of New York City. I am now the grandmother of five living on the beach in Florida. My daughter, Laurie, who posed for Claudia, has a farm in the Finger Lakes of New York; she grows peaches and raspberries, watermelons and cantaloupes, and calls her place The Melon Foundation. She is the mother of Samuel Todd, about whom I have written and illustrated Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Colors and Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Inventions. My son Ross, who posed for Jamie, is the father of Amy Elizabeth, about whom I have written and illustrated Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdale’s, and Sarah. Because he has never cheated at cards—or anything—but like Jamie is excellent with money, he is a consultant in Washington, D.C., and is also my financial adviser. My son Paul, who is the young man sitting in the front of the bus in the picture facing page 13, is a computer scientist, and it is he who convinced me to try writing on the computer—which I do except when I turn my back on it and write in longhand as I did for the entire manuscript of From the Mixed-up Files. Paul is the father of Anna and Meg. I have promised Sarah and Anna and Meg that I would write eponymous books for them. I hoped it would make them look up eponymous, and it did, but they are growing up faster than I can write, so I have yet to keep my promise. I am not yet as old as Mrs. Frankweiler (page 152), and the years in which I can say that are still in the double digits, but they are counting down.
My beloved husband, David, to whom this book is dedicated, and Jean Karl, my stalwart editor, both loved this book from the time of its birth (see the first letter Jean wrote me about it; it’s on the next page). David died last year and Jean died the year before. Sadly, they both will miss this anniversary. And I shall miss them both forever.
Over the years, kids have written to me and asked me to write a sequel. When this book won the 1968 Newbery Medal, I wrote a small piece that was given to people who attended the awards banquet. I am enclosing it here, after Jean Karl’s letter. It is the only sequel I will ever write. I won’t write another, for there is no something-more to tell about Claudia Kincaid and Jamie and Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. They are as they were, and as I hope they will be for the next thirty-five years. I wish them Happy Anniversary and a long and happy life, and I hope you do too.
E.L. Konigsburg
July 21, 1966
Mrs. Elaine L. Konigsburg
Apartment 31
325 King Street
Port Chester, N.Y.
Dear Mrs. Konigsburg:
Since you came in with FROM THE MIXED-UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER, I have found myself chuckling over it more than once. I have read it only once, but the memory of the incidents comes up every once in awhile.
I do really want this book. I will be sending you a contract very shortly. I have some suggestions that I think will make it even better, but don’t want to make them until I have had a chance to read it through again. You will be hearing from me shortly.
JK:ks
From the Mixed-up files & Mrs. E. L. konigsburg
CLAUDIA
What are you writing?
JAMIE
A letter.
CLAUDIA
In pencil? Who ever heard of writing a letter in pencil? You’re supposed to use a pen. Where’s your pen?
JAMIE
I’m renting it to Bruce. Say, Claude, do you spell Newbery like I KNEW the answer or like I wish I had a NEW sister?
CLAUDIA
N-E-W-B-E-R-Y.
JAMIE
What kind of berry is that? I never heard of a one-R-berry.
CLAUDIA
Now you have. What’s Newbery got to do with letters?
JAMIE
You know all that stuff we told to Frankweiler?
CLAUDIA
You mean Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler?
JAMIE
The same. Well, she put it all down into a book, and it won the Newbery Medal. How do you spell medal?
CLAUDIA M-E-D-A-L.
JAMIE
Why isn’t there any T in medal?
CLAUDIA
Because METAL is what MEDALS are made of. So what if Mrs. Frankweiler won the Newbery? I knew that.
JAMIE
Well, Claude, I figure that if the medal is gold, she better cut me in. I’ve been broke ever since we left her place.
THE
NEWBERY-CALDECOTT AWARDS DINNER
* * * * *
Imperial Ballroom
MUEHLEBACH HOTEL
Kansas City, Missouri
June 25, 1968
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler Page 11