KNOW THE PAST,

FIND THE FUTURE

The New York Public Library at 100

Produced and edited by

CARO LLEWELLYN

Photography by

BEOWULF SHEEHAN

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

LAURIE ANDERSON

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

REZA ASLAN

WILLIAM F. BAKER

ISHMAEL BEAH

SAMANTHA BEE

HENRY W. AND ALBERT A. BERG COLLECTION OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

MAYOR BLOOMBERG

ROY BLOUNT, JR.

ERIC BOGOSIAN

IAN BURUMA

GABRIEL BYRNE

HANNAH CABELL

PETER CAREY

ANNE CARSON

CHARLES CARTER

GRAYDON CARTER

ROSANNE CASH

RON CHERNOW

DAVID CHRISTIE

STEPHEN COLBERT

KATHRYN COURT

ELIZABETH C. DENLINGER

KIRAN DESAI

JIM DINE

NATHAN ENGLANDER

WILL ENO

REBECCA FEDERMAN

JAMES FENTON

RENÉE FLEMING

JONATHAN FRANZEN

JONATHAN GALASSI

MARGARET GLOVER

BARBARA GOLDSMITH

ALVARO GONZALEZ-LAZO

ADAM GOPNIK

ANNETTE GORDON-REED

PHILIP GOUREVITCH

VARTAN GREGORIAN

THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS

BLAKE HAZARD

A.M. HOMES

SIRI HUSTVEDT

MICHAEL INMAN

UZODINMA IWEALA

BILL T. JONES

SHARON JONES

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

KAKI KING

NICK LAIRD

THOMAS G. LANNON

IMAM KHALID LATIF

FRAN LEBOWITZ

LIBRARY FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS MUSIC DIVISION STAFF

MAYA LIN

MAIRA LIRIANO

JOHN LITHGOW

LARISSA MACFARQUHAR

MAP DIVISION

ZARELA MARTINEZ

COLUM MCCANN

PATRICK MCGRATH

MARK MORRIS

YOKO ONO

ERIC OWENS

ORHAN PAMUK

MARY LOUISE PARKER

CARYL PHILLIPS

PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION STAFF

JESSICA PIGZA

DARRYL PINCKNEY

MARTHA PLIMPTON

JOSÉ MANUEL PRIETO

FRANCINE PROSE

ANNIE PROULX

LISA RANDALL

LOU REED

DAVID REMNICK

FRANK RICH

JOSH RITTER

RADIO CITY ROCKETTES

PHILIP ROTH

OLIVER SACKS

ROBERT SILVERS

ZADIE SMITH

ST. VINCENT

WESLEY STACE

VICTORIA STEELE

TOM STOPPARD

ELIZABETH STREB

COLM TÓIBÍN

CALVIN TRILLIN

THE TUCK FAMILY

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

VAMPIRE WEEKEND

HAROLD VARMUS

MADELEINE VILJOEN

SARAH VOWELL

WABC–TV NEWS ANCHORS

JAY WALDER

FOREWORD

The year 2011 marks the centennial of The New York Public Library and the 65th anniversary of Penguin Classics. These two institutions—one of the world’s preeminent libraries and the leading publisher of classics in the English-speaking world—share much in regard to their respective aims and values: the spread of literacy, the preservation of our global cultural heritage, the fostering of a love of books and literature, the importance of open access to the arts, and the broadening of our horizons. In light of these simultaneous anniversaries, our two organizations decided to create and publish—together, as a joint project—the book you are now holding. We hope you read it and enjoy it, and we encourage you, in the spirit of a library book, to share it with friends, family, acquaintances, and anyone you know who loves to read.

—Kathryn Court, president and publisher of Penguin Books

PAUL LECLERC, president and CEO of The New York Public Library, with the bronze portrait bust of Voltaire by Jean-Antoine Houdon from 1778

INTRODUCTION

Libraries are the earliest and most enduring cultural entity.

Since their origins in Mesopotamia five thousand years ago, libraries have had only three main purposes, all revolving around collections: to acquire them; to preserve them; and to make them accessible, customarily in highly restricted ways.

What sets The New York Public Library apart from all the libraries that have existed is not that it has amassed, over the past one hundred years—thanks to the taste and brilliance of its curators—one of the greatest collections in history.

Rather it is that the Library has put this magisterial collection at the disposal of literally everyone on the planet.

As opposed to all other great library collections, which are essentially closed to the public, ours is explicitly and deliberately made accessible to all.

Our founders created this radically different paradigm of access a century ago. So that their intentions would be forever present to the public, they chiseled into the marble walls of the great entrance hall two ringing, inspiring affirmations.

The first states the principle of free access: The City of New York erected this building to be maintained forever as a free Library for the use of the People.

And the second stresses the essential connection the founders saw between access and a democratic society: On the diffusion of education among the People rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.

Many generations have already found the future by exploiting the Library’s massive collections to explore, discover, invent, and to create new knowledge and new works of the imagination.

How does one even begin to capture the contribution to culture and to civil society that a century’s worth of readers here have made because of our collections and staff expertise?

One way is to present, as we do in this centennial volume, the reflections of one hundred of today’s notable figures on what the collections mean to them.

They represent the contemporary generation of grateful readers.

I hope the eloquence and beauty of their texts will then inspire us to imagine all the wonderful tales that could be told by countless readers and writers of past generations, all in tribute to this most magnanimous, most wonderful of libraries.

I am deeply grateful to all the writers who have contributed to this precious volume, to Penguin Classics for having published it pro bono, to Caro Llewellyn, who conceived it and made it happen, and to Beowulf Sheehan for his exquisite portraits. You couldn’t have given the Library a more fitting centennial birthday present.

And in the spirit of access to all, we’re giving you this beautiful book free of charge and hope you will share it with others—pass it along—just as we pass along our millions of library books every day.

—Paul LeClerc, president of The New York Public Library

P.S. My favorite item in the collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building is the bronze portrait bust of Voltaire by Jean-Antoine Houdon, signed and dated 1778.

KNOW THE PAST,

FIND THE FUTURE

The New York Public Library at 100

LAURIE ANDERSON, performance artist, musician, and inventor

LAURIE ANDERSON

Declaration of Independence

July 4, 1776

When I got the wish list of things I could see from the collection I was completely overwhelmed. I began to try to narrow it down by circling my favorites. Soon the paper was a mass of interlocking circles. There was almost nothing I didn’t want to see.

When I was a kid I had the rather odd hobby of making my own colonial newspapers. These were reports of the doings in a small town—new laws, property sales, decrees, and gossip modeled on some imaginary New England town. I hand-copied the shaky type of mid-eighteenth-century newspapers and handed them out to my neighbors, who filed them on their back porches.

The story behind these papers was the national myth we almost unconsciously absorbed as kids—the story of rebellion, independence, and freedom, a story hundreds of years old but still dynamic and strangely inspiring even as the empire seemed to be disappearing.

So when I numbered my wish list, the Declaration of Independence was on the top. When they brought it out in its frame—complete with the somewhat shaky type and the actual paper made from rags in one of the little colonial towns—I was suddenly tearful, in awe. Our national heritage and birthright in print.

Other treasures included a print depicting the blunt topped reservoir that stood on the site where the Library now stands; a topographical cutout one-of-a-kind book by Maya Lin; a page from William Blake with the slogan to annihilate the selfhood of deceit and false forgiveness inscribed on a banner at the bottom of the page; some paperbacks, including The Mademoiselle Career Girl’s Guide to New York by Faye Hammel from 1962, Night Side of New York—A Picture of the Great Metropolis After Nightfall by Members of the New York Press, containing illustrations of men breaking into buildings (pictured right); and A Guide for the Woman Vacationist by Marjorie Hillis, author of Live Alone and Like It.

On the way out we stopped at an exhibition of several religions—a collection of small relics and various manuscripts.

Part of the display that caught my eye was a phrase from a timeline of Christian milestones: ca. 1700 B.C.E. Abraham enters into a covenantal relationship with a single, unseeable God. That covered it.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH, philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

OUR LIBRARY

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Phillis Wheatley

1773

One of my favorite paintings is in the Scuola di S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice. It’s known, usually, as St. Jerome in His Study. The oil shows a bearded man, seated at a desk in priestly robes, his pen raised as if he has been distracted for a moment from his writing, looking raptly up through what must be a window to his left, outside the frame of the painting, the light from which casts sharp shadows throughout the space. Behind him is a small altar, with a large statue holding a crucifix, a bishop’s miter and crosier resting to its left and right. Toward the front of the scene, to the left, a small dog sits watching. And along the wall, on the left of the painting, is the end of a single row of books . . . perhaps a few dozen of them.

The painting is the work of the Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio. It was completed in the very early sixteenth century, probably in about 1502. If it were a picture of St. Jerome—who is the undoubted subject of the two paintings to his left—the scene depicted would have taken place in the later part of the fifth century, for the figure is a young man, his beard not yet turned to gray; the other pictures of St. Jerome in the Scuola show him with a white beard . . . presumably, therefore, in the early sixth century, since he died in about 420.

As it happens, though, the painting, despite its customary name, is not of St. Jerome; and the event it pictures can confidently be set in 420, since it represents—as I learned from an article by Helen Roberts in The Art Bulletin for December 1959—the moment of a vision that St. Augustine had on the day of Jerome’s death. Not that this matters much for the value of the painting as historical evidence, since, as was normal in Carpaccio’s day, the painter has represented the great father of the church clothed in the style of his own day and in a room much like that of a scholar of his own time. Which brings me back to that little shelf of books.

Carpaccio was representing the world of one great teacher, one of the greatest of the Father’s of the Church, caught in a vision of another. To symbolize that for his own time he showed someone with a significant library. And a great private library, the library of a scholar, in the Renaissance would have had—by the standards of our own day—only a very few books. Michel Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne, who wrote about his own marvelous library in the later sixteenth century—his Essays first appeared in 1580, half a century after Carpaccio’s death—was justly proud that he owned about one and a half thousand volumes, many of them left to him by his beloved friend, the lawyer-humanist Étienne de La Boétie.

In the Essays Montaigne describes the circular room at the top of a tower on the windswept hill that gave his estate its name; the room to which he came on his thirty-eighth birthday, writing on the beam above his bookshelves that he had retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freed from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life . . . In the same inscription he called this room a sweet sanctuary . . . consecrated to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.

Montaigne’s library contained a wonderfully diverse range of reading, from the super serious—his edition of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, heavily annotated in his own hand, can be seen in the Cambridge University Library—to what he once called the simplement plaisans (the simply delightful), among which he included Boccaccio’s Decameron and Rabelais among the moderns, but also, certainly, Virgil, Horace, and Catullus (along with Lucretius) among the ancients.

The shelf of less than a hundred books in Augustine’s study would have had in it most of the books that Augustine thought worth reading; Montaigne was delighted with his library and would probably have thought that it had most of what he, too, needed. After all, Montaigne was enormously rich by the standards of his day. He could look out from that tower and be pretty confident that in every direction there was no one whose house he could see who had as many books as he did; and while there were great libraries at religious institutions and at the University in Bordeaux, forty miles away, most people did not have access to them. But the richest person in the world today would have a hard time acquiring a copy of most of the books that he or she thought worth reading. You know, if you are a contemporary reader, that you have choices to make among a vast multitude of options and that you simply don’t have the lifetimes it would take to read all the worthwhile books that are already in print. I struggle all the time with that thought: each book I chose is an insignificant fraction of the human library, but a significant fraction of the few thousand books I will ever read.

And here’s the thing: every book in Montaigne’s library (like the article I mentioned in The Art Bulletin, like scores of books about St Jerome, St. Augustine, and Carpaccio) is available to me in the reading rooms of The New York Public Library. That in itself is a quite amazing fact. There are few libraries in the world—the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Widener Library at Harvard—where you can be equally confident that that is so. On a vast range of topics, the same is true: most of what you would need to read to pursue a serious study of the subject is available in The New York Public Library. And to use this library, all you have to do is show up in New York.

In fact, you don’t even have to show up. The Library does an