Ex Libris
By Jeffrey Page
Mischief is afoot at the New York Public Library, where the management wishes to redesign the grand old building at 42nd and Fifth and turn much of it into a huge circulating library – “the crown jewel of the branch system” – the breathless president of the library says.
In doing so, the Daily News reports, roughly 3 million books and papers would have to be relocated out of the stacks in midtown and housed in Princeton, N.J. This means that if you’re doing research in the main reading room at 42nd Street – known as “Room 315” to everyone who’s ever worked at the library – it’s possible you’d have to wait 24 hours for the material you need to be delivered to New York.
Management is focused on that crown jewel business, plus the availability of $150 million from the city to spiff up a world class research facility that needs no spiffing. Serious users of the library see the project as a diminishing of its importance.
Some library stories.
–Let us return to the early Sixties when I worked in NYPL’s Current Periodicals Division – known simply as “Room 108” – in the southeast corner of the first floor. Room 108 housed the most popular magazines of the time such as Life, Time, Consumer Reports, Ramparts, the Saturday Evening Post plus any number of social sciences and medical journals. It also was the repository for some famously obscure, less-in-demand publications. I don’t recall specific titles in this last group but every so often a patron would fill out a call slip asking for something like the Journal of Guernsey Cattle Management in Southwestern Manitoba.
–Life and the other favorite titles were available at the call desk unless Patron No. 1 was already reading an issue that Patron No. 2 requested. We drew some interesting characters in those days such as a slightly crazed Patron No. 2 who’d sit down and stare Patron No. 1 into hurrying up.
–Many of the less popular titles were shelved in the stacks, which were closed to the public. One of my jobs was to find requested publications in the stacks and bring them to the reader in Room 108. It was a pleasant break from the routine of refiling magazines that had been returned to the call desk. Once, it became a little more complicated.
I was wandering through the miles of stacks looking for the American Journal of 18th Century Northwestern Anthropological Studies (which did not, and does not, exist) when I heard a noise that sounded like a suppressed groan. As I rounded a corner, I encountered a most remarkable sight. It was a man, on top of a woman, both on a large wooden desk. Flesh was visible. I believe the expression is in flagrante delicto. I stopped on a dime, turned, and returned to Room 108 to inform the patron that the number he requested had been sent to the bindery and was not available – the standard explanation for periodicals we couldn’t find.
Others have related such stories. I saw it.
–The job didn’t pay much, but Room 108 was a great place to work. My supervisor was a tall, gray-haired Russian émigré named Mrs. Patterson, whose first name for me is long lost. We liked Mrs. Paterson because whenever there was a complaint about a clerk – “He didn’t say, ‘Good morning,’” or “She didn’t get my magazine quickly enough” or “Whaddaya mean someone else is reading it; there’s no one else here” – she almost always took our side.
–The boring part of the job was reshelving all the magazines that had been returned. Every so often, I’d see something interesting and start reading. This annoyed Mrs. Patterson.
–The summer heat in Room 108 could be brutal and there was no air conditioning in Current Periodicals. We had a device that was a combination thermometer and barometer. When the combined readings reached a certain number – I think it was 100 – the library closed Room 108. On especially bad days, one of the clerks would stand by the weather instruments and surreptitiously rub the little bowl of mercury to make it go a little higher a little faster. I think this scam worked once.
–The marble lions guarding the façade on Fifth Avenue were placed in 1911 and were never named Leo or Lena. In fact for their first 20 years they had no names at all. But during the mid-Thirties, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia named them Patience and Fortitude, two traits he believed New Yorkers would need to get through the Great Depression. The other story about Patience to the south and Fortitude to the north is that they are reputed to growl every time a virgin walks past.
–The reason you sometimes had to wait more than a half hour for the books you requested to be sent up from the stacks – when there was no one ahead of you on the call line – was occasionally because the clerk took an interest in your material, or because he was napping.
–Short take: The library’s whimsical telephone number in those days before all-numerical numbers also provided its location – OXford 5-4200.
Tags: Jeffrey Page, NYPL
May 10th, 2012 at 2:04 am
I would love to know whether Fortitude was losing his Patience while virgins may actually have been losing their, well, virginity, way back in the stacks. (I doubt, somehow, that such was the case in the instance you mentioned.)
I worked for six years at my college library, and your story brings back fond memories of a bygone era when no one had ever conceived of a virtual book, and people still relied on the reference sources in libraries to establish indisputable fact. Now, it’s anyone’s guess who authored the Wikipedia article you just pulled up online, and what political agenda the anonymous writer (or writers) may have been trying to advance. What you glean from it is certainly nothing you would want to depend on for uncorroborated verification.
My job was a generally thankless one – searching for lost books, most of which had been stolen by hippies who didn’t believe in individual ownership of property and took delight in “liberating” books without having a clue that they were depriving the authors of royalties.
I never encountered anything remotely as exciting as public copulation atop the study carrels, but I did come across some amazing books during my travels among the stacks. The very best ones, however, were never the ones I was looking for.
Thanks for the memory tour!
May 10th, 2012 at 1:42 pm
C’mon, Jeff.
What’s all this kvetching over a mere 150,000,000? I mean, c’mon. If you stop and think about it, you already answered my question in your own article. Let’s see…1911…now today is somewhere in the middle of spring, 2012. Holy crap! That’s more than a hundred!
Listen, besides my grandma everyone and everyTHING needs a “little” (or as the Americans like to say, “A LOT OF”) “jewel-recrowning”) when nearing one hundred. Or wait. Was it the “in flagrante delicto?” you need when you’re around a hundred? Anyway, it’s probably both.
All I’m trying to say is let’s not get ourselves all in a huff about the non-existent need for yet another viscerally offensive flagrant waste of money on one of New York’s most impressive works of architecture. Don’t sweat the small stuff like THE HISTORY or all the real jewels that are kept there for us to learn from or laugh at or study or that other Latin thing you said. Forget about the wonderful, wooden, slightly dusty smell of all that paper! Which, I might add happens to be far more valuable today in Europe than the U.S. dollar, anyway!
In all seriousness, these are the times that I have to wonder who the hell is running the joint? How can the ‘powers-that-be’ go on flipping the rest of us off while continuing to cash a paycheck (so far, hopefully, just a paycheck) for performing so important a role as managing such a significant, majestic (pick your adjective) place as as the NY Library!
Oh, and by the way: I refuse to believe that the morons in mgmt at the NY Public Library are even actual people until Texas executes one of them! And that goes for the rest of the greedy bastards who’d rather do away with the few REAL jewels we have left in favor of that damn check for 150,000,000 – which won’t help anyone that wants to have, or has had, anything meaningful to do with the library.
Love to read your stuff, Jeff.
Em