TESTIMONIALS
A:
- Caroline Alexander (writer)
"The only occasions on which I catch a whiff of that faraway year are when I open the heavy doors of the Society Library Members' Room on a slow day and stroll into a familiar, deep, imperturbable calm."
- James Atlas (writer, editor)
"I have whiled away afternoons, oblivious to the sirens and clamor of traffic outside the tall windows, reading books I didn't intend to read until I serendipitously stumbled upon them in the classic crowded stacks."
- Gabriel Austin (former owner of Wittenborn Art Book Store)
"The wonderful collection of memoirs in the Library is a great help."
B:
- Jacques Barzun (historian)
"The Library also welcomes the wandering stranger; the lot of us form, in fact, an extended family, with visitors leavening the mass. Many of us are friends, and within the precincts those who are not nonetheless nod and smile at one another as a matter of course. Part of this amiability, I must say, is due to the soothing influence of clear signs everywhere and intelligent arrangements, from the terminals downstairs to the classification and distribution of our riches among the stacks upstairs and below ground."
- Louis Begley (lawyer, novelist)
"I love the Society Library: the way it looks from 79th Street, showing off its modest but ineffably chic facade; the cheerful librarians, compulsively helpful and well informed; the seriousness of the Reference Room, which makes me think of green eyeshades and scholarly toil I shall never know; and the southern exposure of the sunny top floor, large study room where encyclopedias slumber peacefully."
- Laurence Bergreen (writer)
"The Library, in the same spirit, has supplied its members and patrons with a unique resource that, for me at any rate, makes life in New York richer and deeper."
- Sallie Bingham (writer)
"I remember my amazement and delight when I first walked into The New York Society Library, more than three decades ago. Here was the silence I craved, the perfume of books, the seriousness of intention and attention, already wearing away in the world outside."
- Patricia Bosworth (biographer)
" In our tumultuous, surreal culture, the Library is a repository of riches, opinions, thoughts, imaginations, and styles. The New York Society Library must be protected and cherished forever; it is a truly unique place."
- Shareen Brysac (writer)
"As a member of The New York Society Library since the 1970s, I took it for granted that every literate New Yorker was a member. Not so: my husband, Karl Meyer, proudly announces to friends that his membership was the dowry he received when he married me. As writers of biographies and imperial histories, the Library is of indispensable value to us."
C:
- Hortense Calisher (novelist)
"The Library has over the years served me in many ways. When I lived elsewhere, it sent me a constant stream of books."
- Robert Caro (biographer)
"The serenity of the Members' Room is from another age, where Dickens or Trollope would have been as at home reading as I am. Although the ceilings are high, the furniture elegant, the chairs comfortable, the atmosphere is as friendly as the staff who run the Library. it is a wonderful place to escape into the world of a wonderful book."
- Susan Cheever (writer)
"Still, when I think about reading and writing and what they mean to me, when I think about our passion for books and the reading and writing of them, I think of that top floor of The New York Society Library late on an autumn afternoon. The Library is a place where literature was alive - it was then. It is now."
- Hope Cooke (writer)
"The world of books I was discovering in the Library stacks dispelled threat, mitigated sorrow -at least day to day. I started reading my way through all the plastic-wrapped books, especially the ones on history and sociology. The stacks taught me to learn my way home, as did my tactile explorations of the city, my physical scourings."
D:
- Dominick Dunne (writer)
"Quite a few years ago, after my novel The Two Mrs. Grenvilles became a hit, a magazine asked me to be photographed in a place of my choosing in the city that meant a great deal to me. I chose to be photographed in The New York Society Library."
- Eleanor Dwight (biographer)
"The New York Society Library, from the beginning, was the perfect refuge for me, a Ph.D. student searching for Edith Wharton, who I soon learned was a library maven herself. "
E:
- Benita Eisler (writer)
"More astonishingly, these transformations have left the spirit unchanged: warm and welcoming, a refuge and a hideout, and, thankfully, a little eccentric still."
F:
- Ellen Feldman (novelist)
"The Library's determination to keep up with the times, as we all must, gives me confidence in its future, but my favorite moment of the millions I have spent blissfully at work and leisure in the Library is rooted in the past."
- Frances FitzGerald (writer)
"I grew up just a few blocks away from The New York Society Library, and in childhood it was my platonic idea of a library: a grand house with attic upon dimly lit attic, basements upon basements, perhaps haunted and surely containing the history and literature of everything in the world."
G:
- Christopher Gray (writer)
"The trustees were really - perhaps in a genteel way - clawing and biting their way to keep this institution vital and keep it alive. It's that sense of struggle, of a common purpose, that always really leaves me humbled here and makes me feel privileged to have been a member for thirty years."
- S. Hastings Grant, (Librarian of the Mercantile Library Association)
"The NYSL is the 'literary heart' of the city; its pulsations should be felt in every part of the public body ... sending light and knowledge into every quarter of our widely extended city." (1856)
- Jane Goldstein (head of circulation)
"The New York Society Library provides sustenance for those to whom books are as necessary for existence as air. Luckily, in this part of the world, many of these bookaholics have always managed to find the Library."
H:
- David Halberstam, Historian
"I go there for a variety of reasons. I think that the principal reason is that for a few hours a day when I am there, the library slows the pace and deflects the pressure of the city. That, after all, is what sanctuaries are for."
- Elizabeth Hardwick (novelist, critic)
"The Library, although a handsome building, is a landmark, not of bricks and mortar, but of the intellectual and creative life of New York City."
- Molly Haskell (writer, film critic)
"Whenever I am stressed out by my life and have fantasies of leaving the city, I think of the places I love here, and chief among them, the piece de resistance, is The New York Society Library. Just contemplating it, knowing that it contains more riches than a lifetime of reading can exhaust, brings a kind of inner peace, solace to the mind, that others get from yoga or meditation."
- Christopher Hawtree (Punch, January 4, 1997)
"The calmest spot in this frantic city ... the literary equivalent of the Frick Collection."
- Shirley Hazzard (novelist)
"Of course I regard the Library as a refuge and a treasure house. But I also regard it as a powerhouse. I think it is real life and I fear for people who miss this because they are missing a great energizing force, even something frightening."
K:
- Frances Kazan (writer)
"Perhaps the zenith of my Library experience was during the early 1990s when I was pursuing an advanced degree in Turkish studies. The card catalogue revealed a sure trove of rare and unusual books about the Near East."
- Alfred Kazin (writer, critic)
"When I joined, I was proud that so many American writers had preceded me, from Herman Melville to Willa Cather, Truman Capote, and others. I soon discovered that the Society Library was an absolutely necessary resource."
- Karl Kirchwey (poet)
"Its marble halls, antique prints, and beautifully appointed rooms bespeak a kind of privilege: not economic privilege, but rather intellectual privilege."
- Hilton Kramer (critic, editor)
"The Library should indeed be recognized as a pillar of the literary and intellectual life of New York."
L:
- Jenny Lawrence (editor)
"From then on, I tended toward the classics and tolerated no abridgments. I haunted Stack 9, where the Library's audiobooks reside."
- David Garrad Lowe (architectural historian)
"Where else but in the sacred stacks of The New York Society Library could I find so much fantasy and so much truth?"
M:
- Marcus A. McCorison (president emeritus of the American Antiquarian Society)
"As the president emeritus of the American Antiquarian Society, with an intense personal interest in American cultural history, particularly that of printing, bibliography, and book history, I cannot endorse strongly enough the scholarly importance of the Hammond Circulating Library and the efforts of The New York Society Library to properly catalogue and preserve this unique, bibliographical resource."
- Ved Mehta (writer)
"One of the reasons we moved into our 79th Street apartment, some twenty years ago, was because it was only one street over from The New York Society Library, still in its way as chaste as the virgin Madonna. "
N:
- New Yorker, November 28, 1840
"Commodious tables covered with rich food for the literary appetite ... the perfection of literary luxury"
P:
- Hannah Pakula (writer)
"Walking up to 79th Street, I always feel that I will emerge from The New York Society Library a calmer, better informed person and writer, and if I stop at some glitzy emporium on the way, I guess that, like everyone else I know, I cannot entirely escape my childhood."
- Richard Panek (writer)
"Here, the thoughts don't appear in isolation, out of context, emerging singly from the deep recesses of a shelving system that's safely out of the earshot of scholars. Thanks to the Society Library's completely antediluvian policy of open shelving, I have to stand and listen to the whole of history in any one category."
R:
- Henry Hope Reed (Founder, Classical America, 1999)
"The only stairway in New York fit for a Cardinal."
- Louise Rose (writer, educator)
"The New York Society Library, with its friendly, helpful, knowledgeable librarians, comfortable reading rooms, and easy access to an endless supply of books, is a replay of my first joyful library experience."
S:
- Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (historian, educator)
"As one who has been a devotee of The New York Society Library for many years, I rejoice at the opportunity to say how much the Library, its books, its informed and courteous staff, and its cooperative habits have meant to me, and to generations of New York writers."
- Donald Spoto (biographer, theologian)
"The New York Society Library is a haven for readers and writers and is one of the great treasures of the city. I've benefited from its wealth of research resources; I've luxuriated in its calm ambiance; and I've been welcomed by its trustees and staff as a lecturer."
- Jean Strouse (biographer)
"Anyone who's done research here will know the extraordinary pleasure of being able to browse in the stacks, to find exactly what you want, and the even more extraordinary pleasure of discovering the book next to the one you were looking for, which turns out to be even more exactly what you want, even though until that moment you didn't know it existed."
W:
- Geoffrey Ward (historian, screenwriter)
"The Library's stacks are indispensable -and that the fact that as a member one is free to explore them on one's own is a joy now only rarely encountered anywhere else in the city."
- Wendy Wasserstein (playwright)
"I've always been grateful to this Library not only for the research and the books but for being a place for a writer to find some sort of calm, and where you can come in and say "I'm a writer" and nobody looks at you like you're crazy or it's not a profession. They look at you and they give you the dignity of a wonderful place to write. "
- Tom Wolfe (novelist)
"But here in the Library I found the original publications of the works of Vachel Lindsay, a name that doesn't ring many bells today. These books are priceless; I don't know why they lend them to me."
- Meg Wolitzer (novelist)
"Without a doubt, The New York Society Library is my favorite hangout ever: a retreat and an inspiration, a present not just for me and my husband, but for all of New York."
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