The old Smith had been a bookstore clerk and then a librarian just going through the motions, a man who read for escape and who let even the writers he recognized pass by unacknowledged. Then he became part of the process. The authors whose work ended up on the shelves of his library were all around him, absorbing what had already been written and turning it into something new. He saw them getting intimidated, frustrated. The library, its online catalog, the profusion of databases, the protocols—it was complicated. They were on deadline. They needed help. As their librarian, he could help.
I wanted to look closely at the librarians in a particular institution, someplace you could see change happening. What, I wondered, did the digital age look like at a brick-and-mortar library in transition—and not just any library, but the landmark New York Public Library at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. It is a great American library, and one of the great libraries of the world. And it’s changing faster than most, changing before our eyes.
I sat behind the library in Bryant Park on a winter’s day and tried to keep its history in perspective as Gertrude Stein peered down from her marble perch and a bronze William Jennings Bryan entertained the pigeons. The ground it stands on is a palimpsest. This was once a potter’s field full of cholera victims. Then it was a reservoir. Then the reservoir was drained and for years, at the turn of the last century, it was a muddy construction site.
This day, the library was draped in canvas and plastic; a fifty-million-dollar cleaning and facelift had begun. Even the canvas and plastic looked chic; a temporary barricade was a white partition, painted charmingly with ivy. Tourists gathered inside and out, snapping photographs. The fall plantings had been lifted from their beds and an ice-skating rink laid in, so we could twirl if we liked in meaningless circles while contemplating the mysterious business of trying to adapt a nearly hundred-year-old library to the digital age.
What happens here ripples through multiple overlapping worlds—the universe of scholars, past, present, and future; the population of New York; the tourist industry, the publishing business, big philanthropy, and the writer who can’t find a book. And, naturally, what happens in this library happens to its librarians. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, at the intersection of rapid change and financial meltdown, some of its librarians carve out a niche, some get iced out, and some help plan the future of the library and how we use it. You could sit in the park, watching the seasons change, and feel that civilization would be fine, if only the people in charge could get the mix right.
I came across a wonderful quote in Nicholas A. Basbanes’s book about books, Patience and Fortitude, named for the stone lions that guard this library. Attributed to John Willis Clark, an antiquarian book expert who died early in the twentieth century, the quote reads: “a library may be described as a gigantic mincing-machine into which the labours of the past are flung, to be turned out again in a slightly altered form as the literature of the present.” Books are sausages made by writers.
“The library does outreach for kindergartners, Spanish-speaking patrons, job-seekers. Why not this important constituency?” Smith said. Libraries inhaled writers and exhaled their work—not just the books they wrote, but their readings and programs; and their papers and manuscripts filled the archives. They were a living part of this living organism. The NYPL honored famous writers every year at its $1,500-a-head gala, but Smith thought it should also honor its writing stiffs and working joes, those who over the years took the resources of the library and turned them into “the literature of the present.” After months of lobbying, he got the administration’s blessings to throw a holiday party for authors who “used the collections”—writers who had borrowed a desk in one of the writers’ rooms, or had showed up looking for material and happened to mention they were writers, or who came in and scribbled under one of those brass lamps. He intended the party as a gracious message from the library: Think of this place as a home for you, your books, your legacy.
I met him in the center of the food court in Grand Central, at a table laminated with suburban train tickets and schedules and covered with crumbs. Smith opened his briefcase and plucked out the invitation list and a stack of copied invitations to “An NYPL Holiday Season Reception Honoring Authors Using the Collections,” guest-hosted by Roy Blount, Jr. A picture of the library’s sculpted lions was faintly visible in the background, almost like a watermark. Guests were invited to come in “Writing Attire” and feel free to “BYOBook,” that is, bring a copy of one of their own books to display at the party.
In Smith’s dream, the head of NYPL’s research libraries, David Ferriero, would stand up at the celebration—an annual event, possibly?—and announce the creation of an Office for Writers’ Services, which would recognize the library’s special relationship with its neediest, and most productive, patrons.
Smith described his campaign to get approval and funds from multiple departments in the library administration in boxing terms: “I’ve been bounced around, I got roughed up a couple of times. I keep thinking I’m in the ring and no matter how tired I am, I have to keep going.” The harrowing business of trying to reach out and celebrate his patrons! The music was arranged, a Cajun cellist Smith heard on the street and loved. Smith offered him $150, which he agreed to initially, but later decided wasn’t enough. Smith told the guy the names of some of the writers who would be there. Didn’t he get it? The librarian from Carnegie Hall was going to be there! Finally Smith told him, “‘Dude, show up and play, or don’t show up and play.’”
Smith labored over his e-mails to writers, partly out of self-consciousness. He told me he had heard from Tony Kushner, the great playwright who wrote Angels in America, and Nick Tosches, the music journalist. Impressed, his wife, Debbi Smith, an academic librarian at Adelphi University, said, “And to think, I married this quiet librarian!”
I ran my eyes down the guest list, full of familiar and not-so-familiar names. “Who’s this?” I wondered. “Nina Burleigh—she just wrote a fantastic book about Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.” Smith ran down the list, explaining the contribution each guest made to the culture: “Oh, she’s writing a book about lighthouse keepers, but don’t tell anyone…. He wrote a boxing book you’ve got to read…. She writes the funny librarian sketches for Prairie Home Companion; I’ll send you some…. And that’s Barbara, the librarian at the American Kennel Club.”
Wait a minute. A dog librarian? “Oh yeah,” he said, “she’s got a beautiful library. I have to bring her an invitation. You want to come? It’s, like, four blocks from here.” I’d been avoiding getting a dog for twenty years. Surely I could avoid the dog librarian? And what was a dog librarian doing at the writers’ party, anyway?
In the lull between the morning rush hour and the afternoon bustle, someone on Grand Central’s cleanup crew began disinfecting tables. An ammonia wind drifted our way, driving us out of the food tunnel and out the doors of the train station. Somehow we found ourselves walking toward the American Kennel Club Library.
There are thousands of buildings lining the canyons of Manhattan, some more ornate than others, but I never saw one with a lobby floor like that at 260 Madison. Smith signed in with the guard and headed toward the elevator, but I lingered over the art beneath my feet: the two-dimensional globe in brass and Mediterranean blue, the Greek border. Decorating the hall upstairs, by the library, were eight display cases with little brass sculptures of dogs. Through the big glass double doors, a giant oil painting of a purebred something gazed prayerfully toward a beam of light. There was a guard or butler sitting at an ornate reception desk. Smith shambled past him and we headed left through more doors and into the library of an English hunting lodge—anyway, that was the effect, a sense of gleaming order and privilege.
Behind the greeting desk, on which lay an old-fashioned guest book, glass cases displayed massive loving cups, including an oversized one for Pekingese; behind it, a photo of the cup with a Pekingese nestling inside. Presiding over o
ne of the long tables was a glass case containing the skeleton of a midsized dog, and in the winter light streaming in the window he seemed to be looking down his bony jaw at the sole patron, a gentleman studying an old book of pedigrees. The skeleton was not that of any old dog, but of Belgrave Joe, a celebrity dog that died in 1888. We were in a shrine to The Dog, the dog of literature, journalism, and art; the dog of history; its purebred expression; its idealized state. There was no evidence of any wet, muddy, smelly, or mangy mongrels.
New York is full of these gems, little libraries and archives that capture a slice of the past and, in a disorderly and even chaotic world, organize the knowledge and art of, say, Louis Armstrong, or botanical gardens, or pornography (the Museum of Sex owns a collection of pornography painstakingly cataloged over the years by a Library of Congress librarian). The New York Society Library, a subscription library nestled in an Upper East Side town house, has a sweeping staircase and a beautiful old room for its old card catalog (“The members would never let me give this away,” its head librarian says). The fabulous Morgan Library and Museum, with its illuminated manuscripts and Rembrandt etchings, is three blocks down Madison. And…not complaining, but…here we were in the American Kennel Club Library.
The dog librarian was in her late fifties, with neatly cut graying hair and rimless glasses, a jeweled pin of a Scotty on her red boiled wool jacket. Barbara Kolb used to work in public relations for Good Housekeeping and Macy’s, but she never felt she fit in. She would go off to find some information she needed, and find all this other stuff, too. “I was always getting sidetracked.”
In thirteen years here, Kolb had organized the library, modernized its online catalog, and linked it to WorldCat, in between serving the information needs of the American Kennel Club and its magazine and stray members of the general public who wander in and ask about labradoodles or the Westminster Dog Show. Her kingdom comprises eighteen thousand volumes, more or less, some of them rare and irreplaceable, in seventeen languages—two thousand years of writing about dogs, including the only complete set of English Kennel Club magazine in the United States. Other libraries can be ruthless when it comes to their space, but “what’s a great policy in one library can be a horrible policy in another. People say, ‘Let’s weed the stacks!’ For the public library, maybe, but not for a research library.” Recently, Kolb had been collecting old children’s literature about dogs. “I’ve found some very good and rare dog books on eBay,” she said. “I keep my mouth shut and very quietly buy books for the library.” She showed me The Dog’s Dinner Party, the old tale of an eighteenth-century eccentric, an earl who habitually dined with his twelve dogs, assigning them each a footman who served them on silver plates. “You can get some bargains on eBay!”
I could live here, I thought. I could study dogs and help this lovely dog librarian…“Come back anytime,” she said as I tore myself away, “though we’re crazy the week of the dog show!”
The reception for writers was held the first night of Hanukkah, a conflict caught too late to change. The writer Esmeralda Santiago and I got all dolled up in satin and velvet, swishy skirts and heeled boots. Ascending the marble steps, I felt dressed for the library’s grandeur for the first time.
We found David Smith in the Catalog Room, exhausted. He’d gone to an author’s book party the previous night in Queens, caught a late train home, and slept for all of three or four hours. “Have a seat, have a seat,” he said, dislodging some papers so we could crowd in. “I’m a wreck,” Smith kept saying. And then: “Have you seen Roy Blount? He said he was coming to do some research around three. You don’t have his cell number, do you?”
Santiago and I wanted to help, so we went looking for the humorist and president of the Authors Guild. Strolling in our fancy clothes like fine Victorian ladies along the boulevard, we cruised the long aisle of the Rose Reading Room, our heels echoing on the terrazzo floors; then it was downstairs through the periodicals section, and even into the microforms room, where a row of microfilm machines lined the far wall. I looked around that corner, though it occurred to me that if Blount was there, he didn’t want to be found, and what would I say, anyway? “The librarian got nervous, so I’m stalking you?” We gave up and meandered back upstairs, where we saw Smith directing one of his colleagues in the wheeling of a book cart. “There are the books for the party,” Santiago said, the books written by the party guests. We fell in behind the two librarians, giving them an entourage, and a parade.
The Trustees Room was elegant with tapestries and marble fixtures, the great chandelier in the middle of the room twisted with greenery, the brocade drapes framing big windows. Past the winter tree branches, the lights and horns of a traffic jam added to the festivities. It was holiday season, we were in a place of beauty and tradition; we had looked up from our dusty tomes and smudged computer screens and been transformed from solitary drudges into a community of honored guests. Smith could have served us Cheez Whiz.
He moved energetically from table to musician to bar, and at last Blount arrived as the room began to fill and buzz. The center of attention wasn’t the bar or the buffet of shrimp and cheese and cookies, but the table of books by the writers who worked in the library; it was surrounded by partygoers turning the pages of wonderful books you might never have heard of: The Violin Maker; Corner Men; First into Nagasaki; Lucky Girls; The History of the Snowman; and in pride of place in the center, a special nod to two authors who had died the past year but had also worked here: On God, by Norman Mailer, and The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam, both published posthumously.
The party had already spilled out into the hall when Smith’s boss, David Ferriero, raised a toast to “the first annual writers’ celebration, a long overdue tribute to your contributions to literature and scholarship,” and to David Smith, who had done such a fine job connecting authors with information and whose support had made such a difference to “the creative voices of the city.” Smith, proud and blushing, read his remarks to more cheers from his patrons, the writers, and their enablers, the librarians.
It was a beautiful moment, not to be spoiled by a looming future: there would be no Office of Writers’ Services, and no funds, either, for a second or third annual reception for writers. But even if we could have seen that coming, and seen that Smith himself would be offered a retirement package and leave early in the summer of 2009, it wouldn’t have spoiled the mood.
It was Blount’s turn to speak. He took the microphone and told a shaggy-dog story about lining up in the marble hall with a bunch of honored authors for the NYPL gala one year, waiting to be introduced into a great glittering room full of socialites and fancy people, and being shushed—though “you kind of hate to be shushed if you are a Literary Lion.” The introductions had not apparently been synced with the actual entrances, and as Blount stood poised to go through the doors, he heard Barbara Walters announcing “A humorist…a novelist…and incidentally a very good cook,” and it caused him some consternation. Was he, perhaps without even knowing it, a good cook? “I have done things late at night that I don’t remember, and as a writer, you want to remember…” At any rate, with that introduction, he jogged into the great Rose Reading Room, transformed into the scene of a gala, only to find everybody cheering for…Nora Ephron.
It was the ideal story to tell on this occasion. Magazines and newspapers got skinnier every week; bookstores and publishers were increasingly platforms for brands; on the Web, writers were “content providers.” Sometimes, it felt like writers were on their way to becoming the telegraph operators of the twenty-first century. But here in this room, on this night, there were still people who could tell—and celebrate—the difference between Roy Blount, Jr., and Nora Ephron.
Blount had only one burning question before he let the gratified crowd return to its revels: “Will the librarian for the American Kennel Club please identify herself? The novelist Cathleen Schine is dying to meet you.”
The first li
brarian hired to run the New York Public, Dr. John Shaw Billings, designed the layout of the building himself in the late nineteenth century, and it was tricky getting an architectural firm to implement it—McKim, Mead & White, for instance, didn’t care to execute someone else’s plan, particularly if that someone was not an architect, but a librarian. But this librarian knew what he was doing—the stacks were closed, hidden away from the public, yet integrated into the structure of the building. The books gave the illusion of supporting the main reading room, arranged as they were on iron shelves custom-carved by Carrère and Hastings, the architectural firm that had agreed to take direction from Billings, and ended up making its reputation with this project. The reading room was housed on the third floor in a tremendous vaultlike space, insulated from the noise and bustle of midtown Manhattan and topped by the kind of ceiling you’d see in an Italian villa, all clouds and sky painted a deep powdery blue. Down the length of the room—two football fields long, as everyone loves to say—stretched heavy custom-made tables, lit by brass lamps that can be purchased in the gift shop downstairs for $375. Many of the tables now hold computers, free for public use; anyone can walk in and check e-mail. And anyone can get a card and order up any of the precious holdings of the vast research library, to read and examine on the premises. The halls are clogged with tourists; homeless guys mingle with writers at the tables; but unlike the branch libraries, there’s a lovely old-fashioned hush in here. It’s a research library.
People call this building the New York Public Library, but that’s misleading. The New York Public Library is a system of eighty-nine libraries, most of them considerably less glamorous than this one. When I first started haunting the place, it was called the Humanities and Social Sciences Library—but under any name it attracts scholars from around the world, as do the three other jewels of the system: the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center: the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem: and the Science, Industry, and Business Library. The one guarded by lions is the most famous of all, and durable in a way that few monuments to the written word seem to be these days. Even if they wanted to, the NYPL librarians could never digitize everything there in our lifetime. We’ll always need a place for the originals of the Gutenberg Bible, the Declaration of Independence (handwritten by Jefferson), and the yizkor memorial books, all that’s left of various Jewish communities erased over the years, from the First Crusade in the thirteenth century to the Holocaust. We’ll always need printed books that don’t mutate the way digital books do; we’ll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we’ll always need brick-and-mortar libraries. But another library, the ninetieth in the system, is growing explosively in cyberspace.
This Book Is Overdue! Page 15