LIBRARY NOTES
Margaret Maxwell
Letter to the Editor
Wednesday, July 1, 1998
Dear Ms. Lawrence,
It is indeed fitting that Mark Piel was honored for his 20-year service at the Library. I was teaching at Finch College when Mark Piel came, as a very young man, to be our librarian in 1962. Our president, in choosing him, assume he would meet the challenge of upgrading the Finch College Library. And he did.
I remember how I appreciated Mark's handing me advertising brochures with lists of books from companies dealing in the out-of-print books, urging me to mark the ones I considered important for the Finch Library to own. I studied those brochures as eagerly as mystery book fans read whodunits. This opportunity to work with a librarian who encouraged book selection and library building -- as opposed to just adding books -- was exciting. The result was that Mark transformed the Finch Library from an inadequate collection of books into a very fine college library. Of the many tragic sides to the closing of Finch College in 1975, none was more regretted than the dispersal of its excellent library that Mark had been instrumental in building.
As a long-time member of The New York Society Library, nothing about this superb institution has pleased me more than seeing Mark as its librarian, in his quiet but effective way, both maintain its traditions and inconspicuously introduce important innovations. I congratulate Mark and the Library for their choices and activities.
Sincerely,
Margaret Maxwell
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