Why should a visitor to New York read your first choice, the Time Out guidebook?

This guidebook has a good mix of attitude and nice photography, and it also does something which some other books don’t do, because they are more staid or institutional: it finds some of the smaller places that you wouldn’t ordinarily think of, like clubs and less well-known galleries. There is a kind of big-lumbering-elephant way of doing the city, which is visiting the Met, Central Park, the Guggenheim, etc.—and this is not really that. (Time Out also do a separate restaurant guide, so if people are coming and they really want to eat their way through the city, there’s a separate book for that.)

But generally, I just think this is a good book that’s not cluttered by stagey history or long back-stories of buildings—and it’s very good on neighbourhoods. It’s smart about getting you through the actual geography of the city.

The New York Look Book seems an altogether different kind of guide.

'Look Book' is a feature that New York magazine ran for five, six years. This is a very active, vibrant city where a lot of things are happening, but two of the biggest industries are, of course, publishing and fashion. So, how people dress in the city, and the way they think they’re presenting themselves, is always a big deal. (I work in the Condé Nast building, and it’s a big deal here in the building, and in so many ways, it’s also a big deal in the wider city.) And so this book, published by—I should point out—a New Yorker competitor, highlights this, pulling together features from several years of the magazine. The contributors talk to people on the street about what they’re wearing, and do these quirky little interviews about their sense of style and clothing, with questions like, ‘Why are you wearing a rain boot on your head?’

So the subjects of these interviews are selected at random?

Yes – these are street interviews. As with the Time Out book, you get a real sense of the blood flow of the city. People you would think of as real downtown-y people are caught on a corner in the Upper East Side, for instance, and interviewed about why they’re there, and what they’re doing. There’s also a little guide in the back to buying costume jewelry and crazy shoes and whatnot.

People come here and they look at buildings and they look at art, but, as with any city, some of the things that really draw people are the more personal pleasures—food and clothes. I like the idea that guidebooks recognise that. It’s great to give people a sense of what they’ll be doing in between visiting major tourist sites and museums.

What do you think the Look Book says about New York?

Most of us wear clothes—I would say that’s generally true. So I just think it’s a nice lens through which to see the city. At the moment, with Project Runway and all these kinds of shows, people do think about the city in this way; fashion week has become a bigger and bigger thing. The good thing about the Look Book is that it’s so diverse; it really depicts a range of people.

Your third choice, The Power Broker, has been called the greatest book ever written about a city. Why does it do such justice to New York?

Well, if you look at a picture of a place, you can normally get a sense of what it’s like. But hopefully what books do, or what thinking does, is to show you what that place is like underneath. The Power Broker is the definitive history of how, in modern America, cities get built, power gets thrown around, neighbourhoods are overpowered by developers and politicians. It’s gigantic and it’s a biography, but it reads like the most epic novel of building and money and power.

It’s by Robert Caro, who is a master biographer; he went on to write a definitive biography of Lyndon Johnson. And it’s about Robert Moses, the most influential builder and urban planner in the city in the middle of the century. He just decided he was going to do things, change the shape of the land and build a ton of roads and bridges. Whatever you see in the city that is the city—the shape of the city, the body of it—was his doing.

So you would say that this book gives you a view beneath the city’s veneer?

It’s like being in a surgical theatre, when they pin the body open—you’re the medical student up top, and you’re watching, and they show you: ‘Look, this is the lung.’ And there are incredible battles of incredibly powerful people. For example, Robert Moses had a major fight with Franklin Roosevelt before Roosevelt was president, about where they would build these parkways. Roosevelt wanted the Taconic, and Moses wanted another kind of parkway system, so he fought. In most cases, he was able to steamroll everybody and advance his own power.

Moses comes off as a villain—although I wouldn’t say exclusively. He obviously accomplished a lot of important things, but he was a problematic figure in power. Recently, people have been saying: look, he was able to keep things going, to keep bridges up and keep potholes filled... So in the last ten to fifteen years, there’s been a swing back to crediting him.