A Library's Lure & Lore

There once was a girl named Mary.

The lions didn't roar when she walked

by the Library.

--Ogden Nash

Guarding the great white building on Fifth Avenue, the two stone lions that roar only at virgins are probably the friendliest beasts in the Manhattan jungle. Last week the New York Public Library was 50 years old and, it happily boasted, "used by more persons for more purposes than any other library in the world."

The nation's biggest public library is actually a private triumph--the work of three rich, generous New Yorkers who never saw the final result. In 1848 immigrant Fur Tycoon John Jacob Astor left $400,000 to start the Astor Library; in 1870 wealthy Bibliophile James Lenox gave $300,000 for a public library to house his own superb collection; in 1886 onetime Governor Samuel Tilden left $2,000,000 for "a free library and reading room.'' With another $5,200,000 from Andrew Carnegie for branch libraries, the Astor-Lenox-Tilden benefactions launched the New York Public Library.

Nowadays, the two-block-long Renaissance palace receives an average of 8,300 visitors daily. Though the main reading room covers half an acre, during college vacations there is standing room only. One day last Christmas the horde hit a record 21,000.

Answers in 3,000 Languages. What draws this traffic is the library's unique openhandedness with 80 miles of bookshelves that bear witness to 50 centuries of human wisdom and folly--some 28 million items, from Babylonian clay tablets, a Gutenberg Bible and 3,000 cookbooks to five Shakespeare First Folios and Washington's hand-written Farewell Address (3,000,000 more books are in the library's 81 branches). Unlike many of the world's other great libraries, which believe in the closed-door policy, the New York Public Library delivers books to anyone in ten minutes flat. Each day it answers 10,000 questions--over the counter, by mail and by phone--and for the answers it can rack its brain in 3,000 languages, including 600 African dialects.

The knowledge at hand is so breathtaking that the library has aided every conceivable enterprise of man. In World War II it was a prime supplier of maps and data that guided Allied bombers and invaders. U.S. agents broke a Japanese naval code in the library, using the only available copy of an old Mexico City directory. The library had much of the data needed for the Manhattan atom-bomb project.

Handicappers & Treasure Hunters. The library can tell a harried mother what to feed her daughter's new pet eel, or help wives to trace runaway husbands and illegitimate sons to find their fathers. FBI agents constantly thumb the library's foreign and domestic phone directories from 2,700 cities, and many a barroom argument is settled with a quick call to the sober Information Division. About the only thing that ever flustered the library was New York's rage a few years ago over the Herald Tribune's "Tangle Town" puzzle contests. To stem brawls in its halls, the library finally had its branches hand out the daily answers.

Along with somber scholars in the monastic Rare Book Room, the library daily plays host to handicappers of both horseflesh and Wall Street. Lawyers haunt the vast patent collection; merchants study special maps that show shopping trends; fashion designers invent "new" fads from old Sears, Roebuck catalogues. Once the Music Division identified a tune hummed over the phone by an amnesia victim, who then began recalling who he was. To prepare the 1954 school-segregation cases, lawyers for both sides spent months studying education laws at nearby tables before confronting one another in the U.S. Supreme Court. Something similar happened to one man who located buried treasure on a 15th century map of the West Indies. When he got there, another man was already digging--a man who had spied on him at the library.

Preserving & Reducing. Financed privately (except for the city-supported circulation department), the library spends more than half its $4,500,000 yearly budget for an astute, 800-member staff whose big problem is "preserving and reducing." The staff collects anything useful, from Broadway playbills to African political pamphlets; it skillfully selects some 100,000 items a year. New techniques help; microprinting is reducing 500-page books to a dozen or so small index cards. But the library is now so jammed that it may try to dig under backyard Bryant Park for more stack space.

So many people have fallen in love with the library that many of them practically live there. Typical is one New Jersey man who for eleven years has been doggedly tracking down the burial places of 60,000 New Jersey soldiers who fought in the Civil War. "I might as well be plain with you," says he. "I'm a nut." A Harvard doctoral candidate toiled for years alone in the basement under Fifth Avenue, wearing a mask to fight off the dust from 1,000,000 documents left by a 19th century banker.

So many books are produced on the premises that the library even has a special hideaway, the Frederick Lewis Allen Room, where writers can work in peace behind locked doors. Now under way in the "key club" are several novels, biographies and Civil War histories. Without ever having been in London, Author Marchette Chute researched Shakespeare of London in the library, and later delightedly found London to be just as she had described it. "With affection and respect," she next dedicated Ben Jonson of Westminster to the library. "An amazing and stimulating place," she sums up. "And all this free!"

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