Read this exclusive guest post about the wonders of the 42nd Street Library by Con Lehane, author of Murder at the 42nd Street Library, and then make sure you're signed in and comment for a chance to win a copy of the book!
The New York Public Library’s flagship building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, now known as the Schwarzman Building, houses the NYPL’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library. To millions of New Yorkers, it’s known as the 42nd Street Library, as surely as The Avenue of the Americas is Sixth Avenue.
The magnificent beaux arts edifice, carved out of 530,000 cubic feet of white Vermont marble, sits atop of what was once the Croton Reservoir. The library came about when one-time New York governor Samuel J. Tilden (1814-1886) bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to “establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York.” In the early 1890s, a Tilden trustee devised a plan to combine two existing private libraries—those of John Jacob Astor and James Lenox—and the Tilden Trust to form The New York Public Library. The deal was signed and agreed upon on May 23, 1895.
Sixteen years later, more than one million books were set in place for the official dedication of the Library on May 23, 1911 at a ceremony that was presided over by President William Howard Taft. The following morning, when New York's first public library officially opened its doors, between 30,000 and 50,000 visitors streamed through the building. They’re still coming. Millions of scholars, browsers, and tourists visit the library each year.
The 42nd Street Library now houses some 15 million items, among them priceless medieval manuscripts, ancient Japanese scrolls, contemporary novels and poetry, as well as baseball cards, dime novels, and comic books. The Rose Main Reading Room on the third floor is 78 feet wide, 297 feet long, and 51 feet high, with forty-two white oak tables, each seating up to 16 readers. Beneath the reading room, seven floors of stacks hold 88 miles of shelf space, with an additional 37 miles of shelving in the two-level stack extension under Bryant Park.
The library lions guarding the library’s front steps were unveiled at the dedication of the library. (At the time, Teddy Roosevelt wanted buffalo statues.). They were later named Patience and Fortitude by New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s.
The Library’s Holdings Include:
- A 1493 unique copy of Columbus’s letter announcing his discovery of the New World.
- A cuneiform tablet dating from 2050 B.C. may document the oldest real estate transaction on record—the sale of a house in Sumer.
- A letter from a dying John Keats to Fanny Brawne. “My dearest girl…I am glad there is such a thing as the grave. The world is too brutal for me…I wish that I was either in your arms full of faith or that a thunderbolt would strike me.”
- An authoritative version of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, Paradoxes, and other works of prose and poetry, written in the hand of his close friend Rowland Woodward.
- The world’s largest manuscript holdings of Virginia Woolf and W.H. Auden.
- The Esdaile Notebook, a holograph copybook containing 56 or 57 early fair copies of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and one or two probably by Harriet Shelley, the poet's first wife.
- Poems, notebooks, and correspondence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Leigh Hunt, and Robert Southey, and less numerous but no less noteworthy manuscripts and letters by Robert Burns, Williams Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats.
- Manuscript materials of British poets and authors Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Sean O’Casey, H.G. Wells, Vita Sackville-West, Robert Graves, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and others.
- Manuscript materials of American poets and authors Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot (including the typescript/manuscript of The Waste Land, with Pound’s emendations), Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Saul Bellow, Julia Alvarez, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, May Sarton, Laura Riding Jackson, Alfred Kazin, Kenneth Koch, Paul Auster, Philip Levine, Terry Southern, and Bruce Jay Friedman and others.
Some of the Writers and Researchers Who Have Used the Collections of the 42nd Street Library
- Norbert Pearlroth, the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! researcher, found all the information for the newspaper feature using the huge collection in the Library’s Main Reading Room. He sat at the same table for 52 years, from 1923 to 1975.
- Edward Land developed the Polaroid Land Camera and Chester Carlson invented the photocopier through research conducted at the Library.
- DeWitt Wallace read and condensed articles at the Library that he republished in his magazine Reader’s Digest.
- Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in the Library’s Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room.
- Robert A. Caro spent seven years in the library researching “The Power Broker,” his Pulitzer-winning biography of Robert Moses.
- E.B. White wrote a poem about the 42nd Street Library entitled, “The Great Reading Room.”
- Other literary greats like Norman Mailer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elizabeth Bishop, E. L. Doctorow, Henry Miller and Alfred Kazin have cited the Rose Reading Room as a key resource for their work.
- During World War II, Allied military intelligence used the Map Division to research and prepare battle plans.
Surprising Finds at the 42nd Street Library
- A Gutenberg Bible.
- The first printing of the Declaration of Independence.
- Walt Whitman’s personal copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
- What are purported to be (with two letters of attestation) skull fragments from Percy Bysshe Shelley.
- Charles Dickens's actual writing desk.
- Charles Dickens's favorite letter-opener. The handle is the embalmed paw of his beloved cat, Bob, including the claws.
- Jack Kerouac’s glasses.
- The original Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends—Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, and Tigger (the stuffed animals of A. A. Milne).
- 40,000 restaurant menus, dating from the 1850s to the present. It is heavily used by chefs, novelists, and researchers; a few years ago, a marine biologist consulted menus from the early 1900s for a study of fish populations.
Cool New York Public Library Places to Visit Online
- Visit the New York Public Library
- The Schwarman Building (The 42nd Street Library)
- The New York Library for the Performing Arts
- The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
- The Science, Industry, and Business Library
- The Digital Collection
- Secrets of the Stacks
- Find a branch of the NYPL in Manhattan, the Bronx, or Staten Island
- Brooklyn and Queens have their own library systems
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Con Lehane is a mystery writer who lives outside Washington, DC. He's published three previous crime novels featuring New York City bartender Brian McNulty. Over the years, he has worked as a college professor, a union organizer, a labor journalist, and has tended bar at two dozen or so drinking establishments.