The New York Public Library on Fifth Ave. in New York City houses many interesting artifacts. Only the Library of Congress and the British Library are larger. But even the Fifth Avenue landmark by itself is a marvel of big numbers. It is undergoing a $1.2 billion makeover in preparation for its 100th birthday. Built from 1899 to 1911, it cost $9 million, contains 530,000 cubic feet of white Vermont marble and 125 miles of shelving, and opened with an inventory of one million items. Here are some highlights of this fabled institution.
HEAVIEST BOOK A tie between “Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano,” a handmade coffee-table-size trophy, and John James Audubon's 1830s first edition of “Birds of America,” with its life-size raptors and flamingos. Both weigh about 61 pounds.
IN THE EVENT OF FIRE... Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg Collection, which has 35,000 volumes of English and American literature, would save the 1605 handwritten manuscript that contains the most accurate transcriptions of John Donnes "Holy Sonnets."
CABINET OF CURIOSITIES Among the oddities at the library are Elizabeth Barrett Browning's slippers.
ANSWER ZONE The library began its telephone reference service in 1968; it is available online or by calling 917-ASK-NYPL (917-275-6975).
● How old is the moon? 4.72 billion years.
● Where was the toothbrush invented? China, in 1498.
● How often does the service receive questions? Every 10 seconds.
SADDEST ITEM In August 1820, a dying John Keats wrote a letter to his soul mate, Fanny Brawne, that begins with a fond salutation — “My dearest girl” — but goes quickly downhill. “I am glad there is such a thing as the grave,” he wrote. “The world is too brutal for me.” It ends with a romantic flourish: “I wish that I was either in your arms full of faith or that a thunderbolt would strike me.”
MOST FAITHFUL CUSTOMER Norbert Pearlroth, the head researcher for “Ripley's Believe It or Not,” visited the library almost daily. Although he wrote about the incredible, his own routine was anything but: He sat at the same table for 52 years, from 1923 to 1975.
READY FOR ITS CLOSE-UP The library has figured in dozens of films, including “Sex and the City”; “The Wiz”; “The Day After Tomorrow,” right; “Spider-Man”; and “Ghostbusters.”
THE FIORELLO LA GUARDIA IMPACT La Guardia, New York's loquacious Depression-era mayor, renamed the famous lions that guard the Fifth Avenue entrance. The mayor decided that Patience and Fortitude — survival qualities essential during a depression — made better sense than Lord Lenox and Lady Astor, especially since both lions are male.
THIS OLD HOUSE The writing on a cuneiform tablet dating from 2050 B.C. may document the oldest real estate transaction on record — the sale of a house in Sumeria.
MENU, PLEASE The library has 40,000 restaurant menus, the world's largest collection, 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.
THANK YOU FOR SMOKING The Arents Tobacco Collection was assembled by George Arents, whose father was president of the American Tobacco Company. The only collection of its kind, it contains 15,000 books, all of them about or containing references to tobacco. “The Wizard of Oz” and “Alice in Wonderland” are included, but nothing by Shakespeare, who never mentioned tobacco or smoking.
I
N THE EVENT OF FIRE...
MICHAEL INMAN, curator of rare books, would grab
the only printed copy of a four-page letter Columbus wrote in 1493 about his discovery of and reaction to America.
ELIZABETH DENLINGER, curator of the Shelley Collection, was torn between
the one-of-a-kind Esdaile Notebook, a manuscript of Shelley's early poetry, and William Blake's hand-engraved 1793 version of “The Songs of Innocence.”
ISAAC GEWIRTZ, curator of the Berg Collection, which has 35,000 volumes of English and American literature, would save
the 1605 handwritten manuscript that contains the most accurate transcription of John Donne's “Holy Sonnets.”
FIRST BOOK LENT OUT “Ethical Ideas of Our Time,” a treatise on Nietzsche and Tolstoy, by N. I. Grot.
MOST SCANDALOUS BOOK A copy of the so-called Wicked Bible, printed in London in 1631. In it, the word “not” was omitted from the prohibition on adultery.
HEAVIEST BOOK A tie between “Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano,” a handmade coffee-table-size trophy, and John James Audubon's 1830s first edition of “Birds of America,” with its life-size raptors and flamingos. Both weigh about 61 pounds.
CABINET OF CURIOSITIES The most bizarre item, not counting those skull fragments from Percy Bysshe Shelley in Room 319, has to be Charles Dickens's favorite letter-opener. The shaft is ivory, but the handle is the embalmed paw of his beloved cat, Bob, toenails and all.
OTHER ODDITIES
● Truman Capote's cigarette case.
● The cane Virginia Woolf left on the riverbank the day she committed suicide.
● The original Winnie-the-Pooh.
● Hair from the heads of Charlotte Brontë, Walt Whitman, Mary Shelley and Wild Bill Hickok.
● Elizabeth Barrett Browning's slippers.
