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Times Square has such a rich history - it's no wonder that it's the subject of much scholarship and literature. The seedy past of the neighborhood makes a compelling setting for a number of novels, and the bright lights are the perfect subject for photographers.
This section features a compendium of books written about Times Square - from the neighborhood's history and its famous theater district to photography books - if you want to read up on the crossroads of the world, start here. GENERAL HISTORY OF TIMES SQUARE  The Devil's Playground : A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square
by James Traub
As Times Square turns 100, New York Times Magazine contributing writer James Traub tells the story of how this mercurial district became one of the most famous and exciting places in the world. The Devil’s Playground is classic and colorful American history, from the first years of the twentieth century through the Runyonesque heyday of nightclubs and theaters in the 1920s and ’30s, to the district’s decline in the 1960s and its glittering corporate revival in the 1990s. read more... >>>
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 Ghosts of 42nd Street : A History of America's Most Infamous Block
by Anthony Bianco
This showbiz neighborhood, called the "Crossroads of the World" and the "Deuce," is the heart of Anthony Bianco's Ghosts of 42nd Street, a place alive with clashing personalities, extraordinary events, and historic change. Bracketing each these transformations, all part of the present physical reality of West 42nd Street, Bianco starts with the story of Oscar Hammerstein I in the 1890s and continues through Disney's commercial colonization in the 1990s. Across this expanse equaling the 20th century, he's never particularly concerned with forces outside his target neighborhood. Of necessity, these contextual pointers could have included helpful remarks and analyses of urban development and decay, Prohibition, World War II, the expansion of American highways, the predominance of television in post-War life, the 60s generation, and the fantastically Byzantine structure of New York City and state government.
(Purchase this book from Amazon.com)  Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World
by William R. Taylor
A unique volume, "Inventing Times Square" approaches the subject of twentieth-century American city culture through a multidimensional examination of one quintessential urban space: Times Square. Ranging in time from 1905, when the crossroad was given its present name, through to the current plans for redevelopment, the authors examine Times Square as economic hub, real estate bonanza, entertainment center, advertising medium, architectural experiment, and erotic netherworld. Though the volume centers on Times Square, the essays venture much further into urban history and American social history, revealing in the process how Times Square reflected--even epitomized--America as it became an urban consumer culture.
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 Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon
by Lynne B. Sagalyn
Lynne Sagalyn's initial research into Times Square's redevelopment was not promising. The 1991 Manhattan real estate market collapse made it difficult to discern whether the project was on life support or already dead. But New York's leadership simply would not give up, since there was a "deep political need to prove that the city could still do a big project" (p. 225) after the failure of the West Side Highway project and the Columbus Circle redevelopment debacle. Sagalyn observes the astonishing recovery of the 42nd Street Development Project.
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LITERARY  Tales of Times Square
by Josh Alan Friedman
Published and remaindered almost simultaneously in 1986, Tales Of Times Square became an underground legend. It has now been reissued (for the first time in paperback) by the damned souls at Feral House, those cheerful West Coast anarchists who brought you The Satanic Bible and last year's superb Ed Wood bio, Nightmare Of Ecstasy. It's a compilation of Friedman's wank-mag journalism (Screw, Oui) from the golden age of sleaze: the post-sexual revolution, pre-AIDS, late-'70s and early-'80s strip joints, clip joints, all-night grindhouses and Plato's Retreat.
These brief -- but biting -- first-hand accounts of peep shows, prostitution and sex-a-thons are crammed to emetic excess with pimps, one-legged strippers and other low-lifes who could make Damon Runyon twitch in his grave. Friedman colorfully chronicles the almost indescribable squalor and degradation of the lumpen Disneyland that used to be 42nd St. in a way that conveys its its humor as well as its horror. And he does so without resorting to self-righteous condemnation. (Purchase this book from Amazon.com)
 Where the Ball Drops: Days and Nights in Times Square
by Daniel Makagon
During the 1990s, Times Square changed its colors, from a notoriously seedy— some would say sleazy—urban center to a family-friendly, corporate-sponsored entertainment district. Whether this was a renaissance or a loss of soul, a dream fulfilled or just another urban nightmare, the transformation of America U.S. cities nationwide—between pleasure and moralism, participation and exclusion, global connectedness and local roots. These conflicts, as old as the city itself, are part of the living, breathing urban center of light and dark that Daniel Makagon portrays in Where the Ball Drops. Interweaving vivid description and startling analysis, Makagon’s work stretches the boundaries of scholarship to include artfully rendered interviews, dialogues, and reflections. Capturing the competing social and cultural fantasies, the everyday events and historical visions that have given shape and meaning to Times Square, Where the Ball Drops reveals an ongoing urban drama that thrives on the contradictions of public and private life, on individual desires for belonging and anonymity, and on a sense of place and placelessness.
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 The Times Square Story
by Geoffrey O'Brien
It evokes the one-time glitter, the glamour, and the grunge of this fabled piece of real estate before it became Disneyfied-its grind houses and strip joints and freak shows and novelty stores and night clubs and peep shows and fleabag hotels. The Times Square Story also celebrates the world of below-the-line filmmaking as the kid, the producer, the broken-down actor, and Miss Columbus 1952 struggle to bring Fury of Macumba to the big screen-their artistic impulses crippled by financial reality and human frailty. With more than fifty evocative photographs from the golden era of this mythic patch of asphalt, The Times Square Story is a roller-coaster ride through gaudy, seedy, glorious cultural territory.
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ART & PHOTOGRAPHY  Times Square Style: Graphics From The Great White Way
by Vicki Gold Levi and Steven Heller
In 1972, postmodern architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi proclaimed they were ‘learning from Las Vegas’. But decades before the Vegas Strip was a gleam in mobster Bugsy Seigel’s eye, Times Square in New York City was a crucible for American design. Times Square Style celebrates the centenary of the 1904 opening of the New York Times Building on 42nd Street from which the area (formerly Longacre Square) gets its name. The book surveys visual culture from the 100-year history of the Crossroads of the World.
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 The Century in Times Square
by Nancy Lee and Clyde Haberman
In the book, New York's most famous gathering-place is chronicled through extraordinary photographs from the vast archives of The New York Times, the newspaper that gave the square its world-famous name.
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CINEMA  Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square
by Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford
Blazing the trail for trash historians the world over, Bill Landis skilfully brings to life the modern Sodom and Gomorrah that was Times Square During the eighties Landis was a denizen of the Square, cutting class to hang out at notorious grind-houses, engaging himself in a perpetual competition to see how many double and triple bills he could take in.
Eventually Landis found himself consumed by the Square, even earning his living there in a variety of twilight roles from projectionist to hirer of couples to appear in live sex shows. So thanks to Landis’ unique experience and insight, Sleazoid Express is far more than just a study of extreme cinema classics such as Olga’s House of Shame, Farewell Uncle Tom and I Drink Your Blood — all celluloid paths well trodden by previous tomes. It’s a warts and all celebration of Times Square culture, employing a crystal clear, brutally honest narrative to recreate the fleapit cinemas, their morally dubious managers and outrageous audience.
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THEATRE  The City & the Theatre: The History of New York Playhouses; A 250 Year Journey from Bowling Green to Times Square
by Mary C. Henderson and Gerald Schoenfeld
New York, 2004. Complete with illustrations and biographies of more than seventy-five Broadway theatres, this is a vivid, thorough history of Manhattan and the rise of its Theatre District: from 1699, when a petition was first made for a license to perform plays in Manhattan, to the twentieth century and the birth of Times Square, to the recent revitalization of Forty-second Street in the mid-1990's.
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FOR CHILDREN The Cricket in Times Square
by George Selden, with illustrations by Garth Williams
After Chester, a cricket, arrives in the Times Square subway station from his native Connecticut via a picnic basket, he takes up residence in the Bellinis' newsstand. There tiny Chester is lucky enough to find three good friends: a little boy named Mario, whose parents run the unsuccessful newsstand; a fast-talking Broadway mouse called Tucker; and Tucker's pal, Harry Cat. Between escapades in New York City, the four somehow manage to bring success to the almost bankrupt newsstand.
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