"One of the fairest monuments that America has raised"

Part of title page; published by New York Public Library, 1961.

This book commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Library's move to its Fifth Avenue location.

From the credits:

William K. Zinsser is a fourth-generation New Yorker who often writes about his home town. A former critic and editorial writer of the New York Herald Tribune, he is the author of two books and many magazine articles.

That was a name I remembered from family copies of Life.

From my more recent reading, I recalled a jazz biographer's reference to a book by Zinsser, Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz. Its subjects are pianist Dwike Mitchell and bassist-French horn player Willie Ruff, and Zinsser seemed to be a writer who really got around.

Well, I see from his site: he is still around; Zinsser studied piano with Mitchell and in the 1990s did some performing in clubs.

That was only a small break from writing. Among other work during his long career, Zinsser wrote On Writing Well, "the classic guide to writing nonfiction," first published in 1976 and still in print. In 2005 he published Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past.

But getting back to 1961: the illustrator's name was not one I knew, although his style did look familiar—

Tom Funk, whose grandfather co-founded the New York publishing firm of Funk & Wagnalls, has been a free lance illustrator in the city since 1937. His fondness for its vistas is well known to readers of, appropriately, The New Yorker.

These are spot illustrations in classic New Yorker style. To get any decent detail I had to scan them as grayscale, but they actually are printed in a rich black, for a woodcut effect.

Zinsser opens with an anecdote from early in World War II, when the Library needed to consider whether some of its holdings should be removed for safekeeping.

When the curators met to discuss the prospect,

Each... spoke up for the items he thought most valuable: the Gutenberg Bible and the five First Folios of Shakespeare, the handwritten copy of George Washington's Farewell Address and Jefferson's early draft of the Declaration of Independence... and the illuminated copy of Ptolemy's Geography. The longer they talked, the longer the list stretched, for among the 7 million volumes are some of the rarest books and manuscripts in the heritage of mankind.

... Harry M. Lyndenberg, director of the Library, listened gravely and finally said, "But first I think we should evacuate all the pamphlets."

"Save the pamphlets" — now that's a director after my own heart!

Zinsser continues,

He meant that Gutenberg Bibles and Farewell addresses do at least exist in other copies, but that the pamphlets are unique. In thousands of cases the Library's edition is the only one that survives. The same thing is true of the countless old periodicals, broadsides, playbills, scrapbooks, popular songs and other fugitive documents that the Library — and nobody else — has bothered to keep. They are the routine archives of life. Trivial yesterday, they are priceless research tools today.

It is this passion for continuity, for collecting everything and discarding nothing that has made the New York Public Library a supreme reference source, one that extends backward in time to the Babylonian clay table and outward in space to every corner of the globe and many globes beyond...

Zinsser's text is accompanied by Funk's renderings of various building details, inside and out...



Along with those views are illustrations representing the varied collections to be found in the Library's "eighty miles of shelves."

Zinsser describes those extraordinary collections, and the experts who staff them.

I don't work in the library world, and wouldn't normally recognize its notables. But here I actually recognized two names—from this biography of Joseph Cornell.

Like many New York area artists, Cornell was a frequent visitor to the Library. Children's librarian Maria Cimino met him in 1945, when he first did research in her collection. After her 1950 invitation to collaborate on a children's presentation, Cornell loaned some of his boxes. Enthusiastic about his first exhibit for children, he would participate in others in the future.

Romana Javitz was also a friend of Cornell's, as she was of other artists who used the Picture Collection. I first read of her in the same Cornell biography, but have since come across her name in other books about the New York art scene—of the 1930s and beyond.

NYPL's site has this interesting article about the Picture Collection, and Ms. Javitz's role in expanding it into the important archive it became.

She originally studied art, then headed the Picture Collection from 1929 to her retirement in 1968. Among her accomplishments at the Library, she encouraged Arturo Schomburg in developing archives that became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

With many friends and contacts among artists, Ms. Javitz became very active in New Deal arts projects. She was a driving force behind creating the Index of American Design, as well as being involved with Farm Security Administration photography and its preservation.

Zinsser ends his 1961 tour of the collections with this vision, worth quoting at length—

The quality that makes The New York Public Library great is one that runs deeper than men and books. It is the quality of freedom. This is a building that takes no sides because it presents all sides. It grants its visitors the dignity of free access to information. It does not hide the ugly or censor the injurious. These guarantees are woven through every division, and often they take extraordinary form. The Jewish Division owns the biggest known mass of anti-Semitic material; the Picture Collection has hundreds of racist cartoons; the Current Periodicals Room subscribes to subversive magazines.

At first glance such a policy might seem at least unsavory, at most perilous to the very freedoms that it is trying to protect. Rare is the library, in fact, that does not defer in these sensitive areas to the government, the institution or the trustees that control it. The New York Public Library makes no such surrenders. It operates on the belief that free men will find the truth, however devious the route by which they approach it, or at least that they should have the fullest opportunity to try. Enacting this belief every day of the year for fifty years, it is an ornament to democracy, one of the fairest monuments that America has raised.