One of the largest public libraries in the world and, along with the Library of Congress, one of the most important library systems in the country. The main library building is located in New York City, in the center of Manhattan Island, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 41st Street. In addition, the New York Public Library has 87 different divisions and branches in every borough of New York – Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens. Currently, the library has more than 50 million titles in its collections.
The idea for a large, urban, public library came from a New York governor at the time, Samuel Tilden, who, upon his death in 1886, bequeathed most of his inheritance to work on the establishment and maintenance of a free library with reading rooms in New York City.
At that time the city already had two city libraries, but both were private and owned by the millionaires Lennox and one of the wealthiest Americans of the time, Jacob Astor. The Lennox Library contained at that time a huge collection of the rarest and most expensive books and manuscripts and was of great cultural and historical value, while the Astor Library was of a more functional, non-career and reference nature.
In 1892 the Astor and Lennox libraries, using the Tilden Foundation, were united into one system, so the main facade of the New York Public Library building, facing Fifth Avenue, still adorns the inscription “The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations”. And in the very early 1900s, one of the most famous US patrons of all time, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie donated the sum of $5 million to build the main library building.
Thus the New York Public Library is the only one of the country’s major libraries created not by government order, but as an example of private philanthropic activity by wealthy New Yorkers.
The New York Public Library and its main building were to become, in a sense, the intellectual face of New York City. For the construction of the main building, the city authorities have been allocated a huge plot of land with access to the most prestigious street in the city – Fifth Avenue.
The architect John Billinga, who was also the library’s first director, designed the building. The building was the largest marble structure in the country at the time. Construction began in May 1902 and took eight long years.
In 1910 the building was completely finished, but the New York Public Library opened only after one year that was spent for the installation of more than 120 kilometers of shelving, the transportation and arrangement of books, as well as the installation of a mechanical, automatic system for delivering requested books from the library vaults to the circulation desk.
The New York Public Library opened its doors to its first readers on May 23, 1911, with a dedication ceremony presided over by then-President of the United States John Taft, who cut the ribbon at the library’s main entrance at 9 a.m.
An interesting detail is that the first book requested by the reader in the library was in Russian, by the Russian writer and philosopher Nikolai Grot and was called “Moral ideals of our time” – in it the author compares the works of Leo Tolstoy and Friedrich Nietzsche. The man filled out the demand sheet immediately after the library opened at 9:05 and received the book at 9:11, which is unbelievably fast for that time.
The staircase at the entrance to the library building is adorned by two sculptures of lions, which are themselves a real landmark in New York City. The sculptures were made by Edward Potter, and with the lighter hand of Fiorello La Guardia, Mayor of New York City in the 1930s, became known as “Patience” and “Fortitude” two qualities which, according to the Mayor, were necessary for every New Yorker to survive the Great Depression that gripped the country during his time as Mayor.
When it opened in 1911, the New York Public Library had just over a million titles in its collection. Today the collection has grown fiftyfold, second only to the Library of Congress and the British Library.
But the real gem of the New York Public Library’s collection is a complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the first printed book in the world, printed by the German inventor John Gutenberg in 1455. This book is now officially recognized as the rarest and most expensive in the history of mankind.