Trustees & Staff

Trustees

Byron Bell
Charles G. Berry
Ralph S. Brown Jr.
Robert A. Caro
Lyn Chase
Henry S.F. Cooper Jr.
William J. Dean
Benita Eisler
George L.K. Frelinghuysen
James Q. Griffin
Shirley Hazzard
John K. Howat
Anthony D. Knerr
Jenny Lawrence
Linn Cary Mehta
Jean Parker Phifer
Susan L. Robbins
Theodore C. Rogers
Constance R. Roosevelt
Daniel M. Rossner
Jeannette Watson Sanger
Barbara H. Stanton

Staff

FULL-TIME
Mark Bartlett
Susan Chan
Charles Cronin
Jane Goldstein
Endang Hertanto
Janet Howard
Thomas Meaney
Steven McGuirl
John McKeown
Patrick Rayner
Ingrid Richter
Carrie Silberman
Diane Srebnick

PART-TIME
Harry Abarca
Juliet Arkin
Ashley Bowers
Arevig Caprielian
Marie Elia
Keren Fleshler
Marisa Haberfelde
Sara Holliday
Marie Honan
Randi Levy
Pierre-Antoine Louis
Georgiana Mukasa
George MuÒoz
Sophie Novack
Jessica Pigza
Peggy Levin Salwen
Linnea Holman Savapoulas
Grace Elaine Suh
Tinamarie Vella
Stanley Weinman

Library Committees

(June 2005 - May 2006)

Executive Committee

Charles G. Berry, Chair
George L.K. Frelinghuysen, Treasurer
Daniel M. Rossner, Secretary
Ralph S. Brown, Jr.
Barbara H. Stanton

Audit Committee

Ralph S. Brown Jr., Chair
George L.K. Frelinghuysen
Daniel M. Rossner

Finance Committee

George L.K. Frelinghuysen, Chair
Ralph S. Brown Jr.
James Q. Griffin
Anthony D. Knerr
Daniel M. Rossner
Barbara H. Stanton

Nominating Committee

Jean Parker Phifer, Chair
Henry S.F. Cooper Jr.
George L.K. Frelinghuysen
Jenny Lawrence
Linn Cary Mehta
Jeannette Watson Sanger
Barbara H. Stanton

Development Committee

Charles G. Berry, Chair
Lyn Chase
William J. Dean
George L.K. Frelinghuysen
John K. Howat
Edward C. Lord
Roger Pasquier
Susan L. Robbins
Theodore C. Rogers
Daniel M. Rossner
Jeannette Watson Sanger
Barbara H. Stanton

Building and Renovation Committee

Jean Parker Phifer, Chair
Byron Bell
Ralph S. Brown Jr.
Henry S.F. Cooper Jr.
William J. Dean
Barbara H. Stanton

Search Committee

Charles G. Berry, Chair
Ralph S. Brown Jr.
Steven McGuirl
Daniel M. Rossner
Barbara H. Stanton

Book Committee

Benita Eisler, Chair
Marylin Bender Altschul
Richard Aspinwall
Lucienne Bloch
Lyn Chase
Jules Cohn
Henry S.F. Cooper Jr.
Margaret Edsall
Helen Evarts
Linda Fritzinger
Malcolm Goldstein
Shirley Hazzard
Sarah Plimpton
Daniel M. Rossner

Lecture and Exhibition Committee

Jeannette Watson Sanger, Chair
Lyn Chase
Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.
William J. Dean
Jenny Lawrence
Barbara H. Stanton

Children's Library Committee

Susan L. Robbins, Chair
Andrea Labov Clark
Peggy Ellis
Carolyn Goodrich
Jan Grossman
Abraham Hsuan
Pat Langer
Louise Monjo
Jenny Price
Jeannette Watson Sanger
Edra Ziesk

Member Relations Committee

Linn Cary Mehta, Co-chair
Jane Goldstein, Co-chair
Ralph S. Brown Jr.
Jules Cohn
Margaret Edsall
Ellen Feldman
Edward C. Lord
Nancy Preston
Daniel M. Rossner
Kenneth Wang

Project Cicero Committee

Laureine Greenbaum, Co-chair
Susan L. Robbins, Co-chair
Silda Wall, Co-chair
Lynn Abraham
Rona Berg
Andrea Labov Clark
Roz Edelman
Emma Edelson
Peggy Ellis
Linda Gelfond
Pat Langer
Carolyn McGown
Ellen Hay Newman
Cynthia Rothman
Jeryl Rothschild

New York City Book Awards Committee

Constance R. Roosevelt, Chair
Lucienne Bloch
Barbara Cohen
Jules Cohn
Joan K. Davidson
Ellen Feldman
Martin Filler
Roger Pasquier
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
Daniel M. Rossner
Wendy Wasserstein
Meg Wolitzer

Report of the Chairman

Charles G. Berry
(June 2005 - May 2006)

I am pleased to present my first report as Chairman of the Library's Board. This has been a particularly exciting and active year.

We have been fortunate to have as our Interim Head Librarian our former Head of Cataloguing, Mark Bartlett.* Mark has brought energy and enthusiasm to the task, ensuring that the Library has maintained a positive and productive atmosphere, and has continued to be responsive to the needs of our members throughout the ongoing renovations.

The physical appearance of our building has been greatly enhanced by the cleaning of our faÁade, installation of a new awning, and renovation of our Members' Room, Reference Room, and other public spaces. The long-awaited installation of our new east elevator is expected to be completed this fall. The staff has worked hard to ensure that our members have continued to receive first-rate service throughout this extensive work. The chair of the Board's Renovation Committee, Jean Parker Phifer, has done a tremendous job on all fronts, as has our indispensable facilities manager, John McKeown.

This year we were saddened by the untimely loss of a much-loved longtime member, Wendy Wasserstein. She wrote major parts of many of her plays and other works, including her now-classic The Heidi Chronicles, in our private writing rooms, and she served as an energetic and imaginative member of our New York City Book Awards Committee.

The past year also marked the retirement of Bill Dean after twelve years of service as chairman of our Board. He saw the Library through a quiet but dramatic period of change and development. Under his chairmanship, the Library Library Notes, launched our involvement in Project Cicero (which has delivered hundreds of thousands of books to public school classrooms), and celebrated our 250th anniversary. Bill did all this with consistent equanimity and good cheer.

Bill is a man of many parts. He is a lover of Chekhov and Montaigne and virtually an honorary citizen of the Republic of Venice. A devote of opera, he has seen both sides of the footlights at the Met, having served as a supernumerary in Aida. He continues to write a delightful column in the Christian Science Monitor, often recounting scenes of his wide-ranging walks in our great city. He is also a lawyer who brings respect and appreciation to that profession I share with him. A longtime director of Volunteers of Legal Service, he coordinates the provision of pro bono legal services throughout the city and serves as a conscience for New York's legal community. He is also a living embodiment of the tenet "mens sana in corpore sano" and still excels in frequent basketball games at the East Side Settlement House.

But perhaps most important and meaningful for me personally, Bill has set a tone and example for all of us who are involved with the Library. His indomitable good cheer has kept the Board's interactions on a positive footing and made Board service a pleasure and privilege for us all. Firm and decisive when the occasion demands, he has always maintained a clear sense of the Library's mission. He never let us forget the importance of what Emily Dickinson, in a letter to her friend Joseph Lyman, called "the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul - books." In the marvelous 250th anniversary book edited by Jenny Lawrence and Bill's predecessor, Henry Cooper, Bill wrote a beautifully expressed appreciation of his favorite author, Chekhov, in words that could be equally applied to Bill himself: "He understands how difficult life is for most people. He is generous in portraying those who strive to live a better life, even when they may fail. He is modest. He never condemns. He is tender towards those who suffer." I greatly value the example Bill Dean has set, and as his successor I hope to apply that example in leading the Library.

*This report was presented orally at the Annual Meeting on April 19, 2006. By the time of this publication, Mark has been appointed Head Librarian, concluding an intensive and productive search process.

Report of the Librarian

Mark Bartlett
(June 2005 - May 2006)

Michael Gorman, President of the American Library Association, wrote a short piece on the beauty of small libraries in Our Singular Strengths: Meditations for Librarians (1998). Gorman says that

The dominating factor in library use satisfaction is size. Just look at the libraries that most users love. Children's libraries, small public libraries, the one-to-two person departmental libraries in universities, special libraries in which the librarian works with the users as a colleague, private libraries. It is not difficult to see what makes these libraries special - the opportunity they afford for the librarians to get to know the users as people and the opportunity for those users to create a human relationship with the librarians and the library itself. Though huge libraries can inspire awe, it is very often the small library that inspires affection in the end, it is the human scale and human relationships that count - in libraries as in the rest of life.

As I was forming my thoughts for this report, I realized that Gorman's words described our wonderful institution, the New York Society Library. Let me now share with you a taste of what we have been doing in the last year, both inside and outside the building.

 
Services and Membership

In 2005, the circulation desk staff checked out more than 83,000 items, about 4,000 more than the previous year. With reserves on titles coming in through the catalog as well as by phone and in person, holds continue to generate a large portion of the circulation activity. Two improvements helped the Library save dollars. First, Jane Goldstein's department switched to printing notices on plain paper rather than expensive postcard stock. Second, an increasing number of members receive their hold notices by email, which is quicker and cheaper all around. Members with email accounts who are not receiving notices by email just need to let the front desk know they now want notices by email rather than by the U.S. postal service.

New titles, both reserved and picked up in the lobby, account for 38% of the Library's circulation. An even larger proportion of circulation - almost half - comes from the more than 270,000 volumes sitting in our very full stacks. Children's books account for 14% of circulation. I know that I am not alone when I tell you that a unique pleasure of working in the Library is scanning the to-be-shelved carts of books that our part-time pages regularly return to the stack shelves - it is so interesting to see the breadth and depth of our members' reading tastes.

As our Library grows, we find the study rooms are busier than ever. The two private writing rooms on the fifth floor are always popular, as is the Large Study Room. We also find more and more people are tucking themselves away at the little desks scattered throughout the stacks and are finding their way to the Whitridge Room on the third floor.

Last month I showed the various study rooms and spaces to a new member. She came from California to New York City for just one week, and chose our Library as her daytime home to work on her new book. As I toured her through the building, she said, "Oh, just one of those stack desks - that's what I want - somewhere very private."

Our membership numbers continue to be healthy. As of March 2005, we have 3,058 members (including shareholders), with household memberships staying very steady at 2,624. In April our membership rates were raised for household members for the first time in three years. The fiscal reality is that libraries are much more expensive to run than they were in the past, and we hope that our members understand the need to periodically re-assess membership rates.

I want to express thanks to Linn Cary Mehta, Jules Cohn, and Jane Goldstein of the Member Relations Committee. Our one-page Library rules document has been discussed, fine-tuned, rewritten, and approved; it is now posted throughout the building and on the website. The Committee also revised the Guide to Membership.

It is no surprise that the children's collection continues to be heavily used. Twelve thousand books circulated in 2005, and 122 new families (with children under age 13) became members of the Library. Since I moved to the 3rd floor in December, it has been rewarding to be in the midst of the very lively Children's Library. It has also caused me to recall my own childhood in New Brunswick, when my father and mother introduced me to the joys of books and reading at our local library.

There are other developments with member services. Mr. Piel's retirement in January 2005 presented the Library staff with an interesting challenge: how would we continue to provide reference service at his desk? Would it be one person? Would it be many of us? Did we even need to have the reference desk now? Since that time, staff members from all parts of the Library - Diane Srebnick, Patrick Rayner, Janet Howard, Jane Goldstein, Endang Hertanto, Steve McGuirl, Carrie Silberman, Randi Levy, and I - have each taken shifts at the "Piel desk." It has been a change for members to see both familiar faces and some unfamiliar faces sitting there. Basic reference and more advanced questions continue to be varied, unpredictable, and refreshing. We do not always find an answer, but we will always try. A sample of questions from the last year: "I want to see all your books by and about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and by the way, was her obituary ever published in the New York Times?"; "Do you have a copy of Michael Frayn's play Noises Off?'" (After some detective work, we did find it, but it was somewhat buried in a 1980s volume of the Best Plays series); and recently a member asked, "Can you tell me the population of Klagenfurt, Austria in 1900?" (The answer was right at our fingertips in the classic 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1910: it was 24,314).

 
Events and Outreach

More than 200 families participated in the many children's events organized by Carrie Silberman and Randi Levy, which included storytelling, author visits, and writing and book-making workshops. Special events for older children this year included programs and workshops with playwright Rob Ackerman, author Melanie Rehak, and author/illustrators Brian Selznick, Lynn Barasch, and Jules and Kate Feiffer. The Society Library was pleased to congratulate Chris Raschka, a Library member, for winning the 2006 Caldecott Medal for The Hello, Goodbye Window. This prestigious award is given annually by the American Library Association to the most distinguished illustrated children's book.

Project Cicero is now in its sixth year. In cooperation with more than 80 independent, public, and parochial schools and hundreds of students and adult volunteers, Project Cicero collected and distributed more than 125,000 books to create and enhance classroom and school libraries in under-resourced schools throughout the city.

The Children's Library Committee, chaired by Susan Robbins, received more than 100 entries for the Fourth Annual Young Writers Awards this spring; awards are given for prose and poetry that evoke the spirit of New York. The ceremony and reception were held on May 9. This year's award winners were Kristian Bailey, "A World of Its Own;" Amelia Cai, "New York: A Sestina;" Lindsay Jadow, "Brooklyn Bridge Poem;" Elly Katz, "My Backyard;" Garth Morgan, "Duane Reade;" and David Zask, "Country Kid." Honorable mentions were given to Sari Flomenbaum, "Piece by Piece;" Lauren Krause, "Out of the Ashes of Tragedy;" and Jeffrey Radin, "Rush Hour, New York."

Adult programs continue to be popular with our members. Walt Whitman was not himself a member of the Library, but in 1842 he recorded attending a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson at our former building on Broadway at Leonard Street. In November we resurrected that memory through a series of conversations with distinguished professor and Whitman biographer David Reynolds.

Lectures in the Members' Room are the other staple of our program season; this year they included Francine du Plessix Gray on Them, her 2005 memoir about her parents; novelist, columnist, and humorist Jonathan Ames describing the road from novel to movie; Barbara Goldsmith sharing her acute observations about the state of modern biography, based on her own recent work on Marie Curie; and biographer Barbara Burkhardt speaking about novelist and editor William Maxwell.

The Author Series, co-sponsored annually with Channel 13/WNET, continues to be a great success for our members and 13's contributors. Our speakers have included Edmund Morris, who illustrated his talk about Ludwig von Beethoven with live piano excerpts; Hazel Rowley, who showed rare video footage of her subjects, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre; Robert Caro, whose monumental ongoing work on Lyndon Johnson needed no audiovisual aids; and Zlata Filipovic, who reflected on surviving the siege of Sarajevo and on the new edition of her book, Zlata's Diary.

We have received an overwhelmingly positive response to past theatrical presentations in the Members' Room. This February we offered the T.E.S.T. Theater Company in a moving play about the later life of Mary Todd Lincoln, The Last of Mrs. Lincoln. A cast of twelve with full sets, props and costumes fit into the room and still left space for 70 enthusiastic audience members. We look forward to other successful dramatic presentations in future seasons.

Last, but certainly not least, reading groups continue to be among our most popular offerings. Carol Rial is now in her sixth season of leading groups on a wide range of fiction and nonfiction topics, and this season we are also hosting acclaimed novelist Roxana Robinson treating three works of fiction on topics of social conscience.

We are always pleased to present the New York City Book Awards, which since 1996 have honored the best books about the city each year. The 2005-06 winners were New York Burning by Jill Lepore, about a little-known eighteenth-century slave plot to destroy New York City, Redemption by Steven G. Kellman, a biography of novelist Henry Roth (author of the classic Call it Sleep), and The Mythic City by Donald Albrecht and the Museum of the City of New York, a collection of New York photographs between 1925 and 1940 by Samuel H. Gottscho. The awards ceremony and reception, always a highlight of our year, took place on May 3 in the Members' Room.

I would like to give special thanks to Jeannette Watson Sanger, Sara Holliday, and the Lecture and Exhibition Committee for all their hard work this past year.

 
Collections

Our wonderful adult and children's collections continue to grow. Over 4,600 volumes were received as purchases or gifts in the last year. This number includes all the extra copies we have to buy for heavily requested titles like Ian McEwan's Saturday, Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and E.L. Doctorow's The March, and for replacing our shelf-worn copies of classics. Lobby books consistently reflect that ours is a reader's library - fiction, short stories, mysteries, and biographies constitute the largest percentage of our new titles. But the Library continues to build strong subject collections in history and travel, social sciences, literature and criticism, and arts and recreation.

We develop our collection through many, many hours of reading reviews, scanning catalogs, handling member requests, and - perhaps most gratifying for all involved - talking and arguing about books! Thank you so much to our very active Book Committee, chaired by Trustee Benita Eisler, and to Steve McGuirl, Janet Howard, Carrie Silberman, and Randi Levy, for all their work in developing the Society Library collection.

The Library keeps an eye out for the publication of significant encyclopedias. We have to buy selectively, of course. This year we added three major new sets to the collection: the highly-praised, 6-volume set, The Oxford History of Western Music (written exclusively by musicologist Richard Taruskin over the course of 13 years); The Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure in America; and the very compelling Encyclopedia of Exploration (in two volumes, covering the period to 1800 and then from 1800-1850).

This past year, the Cataloging Department cataloged more than 4,000 books, periodicals, and audio books. All the Stack 10 rare books collections were shifted and reorganized; our named Special Collections are now arranged for easier retrieval by department staff.

While preparing my report, I reviewed many of the Librarians' annual reports from half a century ago. I found it very interesting to read how many times Librarian Sylvia Hilton mentioned finding very valuable books in our open stacks. This tradition continues. Valuable books are spotted by staff and members, brought to our attention, re-cataloged more thoroughly in the catalog, and given a permanent home in the rare or closed stacks. In many cases, these may one day become future exhibition items for the Library. This year we were thrilled to find first U.S. editions of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the beloved classic The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, and Louise Saunders' The Knave of Hearts, the 1925 edition with illustrations by Library member Maxfield Parrish.

We are proud that our rare collections continue to be used by members, writers, scholars and researchers; this year we had visitors from New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Switzerland.

As well, our books are borrowed for exhibitions, locally, nationally, and internationally. This year some of our oldest books are breathing Austrian air. Last fall our trustee Linn Cary Mehta met Werner Hanak, curator of the Jewish Museum of Vienna, at the academic symposium "Lorenzo da Ponte, a Bridge from Italy to New York." Dr. Hanak was in New York City for this special event at Columbia University's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies. It was a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Da Ponte's arrival in the United States. Linn brought Werner to the Society Library one rainy Thursday morning to view a handful of the 600 volumes Da Ponte had placed here in 1827. Now, six of our Da Ponte volumes are on display at the Jewish Museum of Vienna's exhibition The City of Tolerance: The Aryanized Da Ponte and the Jewish Mozart. We received the exhibition catalog in the mail and have added it to the Library collection.

As a Library, we need to ensure that books like those in our Da Ponte, Sharpe, Winthrop, Hammond, and other Special Collections continue to be made available to members, researchers, and scholars. To make them available, we repair, rebind, and conserve a wide array of old and new books from both the open stacks and the rare books stacks. Our conservator George MuÒoz oversees this necessary element of building and maintaining our growing Library collection. This past year, George also taught an adult class, Home Book Maintenance, on maintaining your own collection, including proper handling, cleaning, and basic repair techniques, and a children's class, in which participants bound their own blank books. Both classes were very successful and we hope to hold them again.

 
Technology

Technology plays an increasingly important part in the services we offer to our members and the work done by the Library staff. I can assure you that we chose wisely when we selected the Innovative Interfaces system to take us into this new century. With a few keystrokes, Head of Systems Ingrid Richter answers questions promptly - our New York Times online archive was used 23,000 times last year; 66% of our active members have email addresses; and finally, other than the Library's main page, the most popular documents on our website continue to be the Travel pages: Virginia Woolf's London, Kafka's Prague, and Proust's Paris. Perhaps our members and others around the world are busy planning vacations to these beautiful cities?

Technology and library resources classes were successful again last year, dealing with such varied topics as digital imaging, personal computer cleanup, internet search engines, and print reference sources.

 
Conclusion

The Library grows each year when staff members are given the opportunity to attend educational workshops and conferences. Over the last few months, staff members have attended a variety of local, regional, and national events. Children's Librarians Carrie Silberman and Randi Levy attended the American Library Association annual conference and Book Fest; our Conservator George attended an excellent workshop on traditional gold tooling hosted by the Conservation Center of Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia; Rare Books Librarian Arevig Caprielian and I attended a workshop on digitization for libraries here in New York City; and finally, our Head of Systems, Ingrid Richter, recently returned from the annual Computers in Libraries conference in Washington D.C., where the cutting edge of computer and library technology was presented to librarians and information professionals.

I would like to finish my comments with sincere thanks to the pages and bibliographic assistants, who are vital to the Library's services and collections. The pages and assistants this past year have been Juliet Arkin, Ashley Bowers, Marie Elia, Keren Fleshler, Marisa Haberfelde, Tao Lin, Kira Limer, Pierre-Antoine Louis, Georgiana Mukasa, Sophie Novack, Jessica Pigza, Kayla Ohmes, Tinamarie Vella, and Alice Wiemers. They sort and shelve books, dash to fix that difficult photocopier on the 5th floor, assist the catalogers with creating and perfecting the catalog, go to the bank to make deposits and get petty cash, help members locate items in the stacks, and give tours to prospective Library members.

Speaking of tours, no year in the Library goes without the mention of Herman Melville. This year's Melville anecdote is an interesting one. A Library member brought her friend in for a tour, our page Pierre did the honors, and as we soon discovered, the friend was in fact the great-great-great-grandnephew of Herman Melville. He is a popular international recording artist, living here in New York City, and goes by the name "Moby"!

In closing, I want to thank other key people who keep this Library running. Mrs. Edmée Reit has volunteered as the Library's archivist and filer extraordinaire for several years. Mrs. Reit has been so helpful as we planned for the visit of our collections appraiser this March. She fielded many questions about the artwork, furniture, decorative objects, maps, and manuscripts. I also recently learned that our accountant Stanley Weinman came to the Library 10 years ago - I thank Stanley for his hard work and look forward to 10 more years. Library member Jerry Patterson is our rare book collection appraiser. This year Jerry updated his 1995 appraisal of our rare books, and we thank him for this gift-in-kind.

Finally, I would be amiss if I did not extend my thanks to Charles Berry, Chairman, and each and every member of the Board of Trustees and Library staff. It has been a pleasure working with each of you. It has been an honor serving as the Interim Head Librarian.

My personal and professional hope is that we will continue to build and improve the Society Library; that we will keep this a place to inspire the affection of each and every one of our members.

Respectfully submitted,
Mark Bartlett, Librarian

Report of the Treasurer

George L.K. Frelinghuysen
(January - December 2005)

For calendar 2005, the New York Society Library recorded an operating surplus of $4,686 prior to non-cash items. This was below the surplus recorded for 2004 of $59,241. Core revenues increased year-over-year with the decline in membership subscriptions offset by an increase in annual donations. Core expenses were up 3.8% due to higher payroll and administration expense.

The Library's endowment at the end of 2005 was $29.8 million. The draw from the endowment (calculated at 4.5 percent of its three-year rolling average) offset some of the market appreciation. The portfolios of both investment managers turned in strong performances easily surpassing their respective benchmark indices. As of December 31, 2005, 89 percent of the endowment was held in a balanced account and 11 percent was invested in an international equity portfolio.

STATEMENT OF REVENUE & EXPENSES UNRESTRICTED NET ASSETS
31 December 2005 with comparative totals for 2004

The approximate market value of investments on December 31, 2005 was $29,707,000.Note: This statement includes unrestricted revenue and expenses only. All other funds are accounted for separately. Fully audited financial statements are available at the library.