Shelf discovery

When people think of the New York Public Library, they usually imagine the venerable, stone-lion–flanked Beaux Arts edifice on Fifth Avenue. But the citywide system actually consists of 89 branches. With more than 52 million items (books, DVDs, CDs) available in Manhattan (41 branches), the Bronx (35) and Staten Island (12), the NYPL makes your local bookstore look like a veritable grain of sand on the beach. They have great author events (Oliver Sacks kicks off the fall season of LIVE from the NYPL on September 21), nerdy exhibitions (one featuring early Dutch and English maps of the NYC area opens this fall), places to sit, computers and, for laptop luggers, powerful Wi-Fi. Any city resident can sign up for a card at nypl.org. According to David Ferriero, the Andrew W. Mellon director of the NYPL, more people than ever are starting to use the library; here are some reasons why.

They anticipate your needs. According to Ferriero, there is a staff of librarians that study and anticipate best-seller lists to help determine how many copies of each book they need to purchase. “When the last Harry Potter book came out, we bought 2,000 copies, and there were already 1,600 requests on the day before it hit the shelves.” But best-sellers are a mere sliver of the volumes the library acquires. “We try to cater to all New York readers’ interests,” Ferriero says. That means science books, sci-fi, romance, manga, history, so-called street lit and books in translation—crucial in a multilingual city where foreign-language stores have a hard time staying in business.

The NYPL carries a lot of books that you won’t find at your local bookstore. Sometimes there’s a waiting list for best-sellers at the NYPL (note: if you want the new Stephenie Meyer novel now, go buy it). But when it comes to selection, the library is unbeatable. Here’s a random sampling of books that you can check out at the central branch but may have trouble tracking down in stores: Balzac’s Lost Illusions, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Joy Williams’s Honored Guest, Richard Price’s Freedomland, Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn and Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler (a 2008 National Book Award finalist).

In fact, you can find almost any book at the NYPL. The library has four research branches: Stephen A. Schwarzman (formerly Humanities and Social Sciences) on Fifth Avenue off Bryant Park; Science, Industry and Business at Madison Avenue and 34th Street; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue) and 135th Street; and the Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. (All are noncirculating libraries, which means that you can’t take the books home.) “We don’t throw anything out at these branches,” says Ferriero. “The purpose of the research libraries is to collect material that is going to be used forever.”

You can reserve books online. Members can track and request books at nypl.org. If you’re interested in a book but aren’t ready to pick it up just yet, you can add it to your online “to-read” queue—just like Netflix! You can also renew your books without going to the library. And when you’re done, you can drop them off at any branch, regardless of where you checked them out.

They will do research for you. Sometimes, there are questions that even Google can’t answer. But you can still call 917-ASK-NYPL, which will put you in touch with researchers seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Topics of inquiry have included the history of Gorgonzola cheese and the origins of the word camp (in the sense of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”). “Someone recently asked: In what sport, aside from cards, does one ‘deal’?” says one researcher. “The only game we found was hurling—a Celtic sport. It’s also sometimes used in baseball to describe pitching.”

It has history. Why do Brooklyn and Queens have separate library systems? It’s because the NYPL was founded in 1895 (starting out with the consolidation of the private libraries of John Jacob Astor and James Lennox), three years before Queens and Brooklyn joined the city of New York. Though some branches aren’t much to look at, others ooze historical detail and personal stories. When the Tompkins Square Library celebrated its centennial in 2004, Martin Scorsese showed up with a book he borrowed there frequently as a child: Deems Taylor’s A Pictorial History of the Movies.

It doesn’t cost anything. Unless, that is, you return your items late, in which case you’ll be charged, per day, 25 cents for books and CDs, and one dollar for DVDs and CD-ROMs.

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