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Blowing the Dust off the Repository of History

Christopher Hawtree

In the January 4-10, 1997 issue of Punch, Christopher Hawtree profiled the Library in the article: Blowing the Dust off the Repository of History: An Oasis of Calm in a Frantic City. Mr. Hawtree reviews books and writes articles on the American cultural scene now only for Punch but the TLS, The Spectator, and The London Review of Books.

The Reverend John Sharpe had been Chaplaine to His Majesty's Garrison in the province of New York, where he was dismayed to find that no libraries existed. He left behind a collection of books to start one that would "advance learning and piety." Some 30 years later after his death, half-a-dozen of the great and good brought it into being in 1754 (a year after the British Museum)...

The Society Library only moved to this Italianate townhouse on the Upper East Side in 1937, but its stacks summon the ghosts of its downtown past, where it was visited by Thackeray and Dickens... Herman Melville joined the Library three times and made thorough use of William Scoresby's Account of the Arctic Regions with a History of the Northern Whale-fishery—before writing Moby Dick. And he isn't the only visitor to have been inspired by the Library.

Henry James senior felt certain that it was his meeting Emerson there that inspired his sons to write. But, just as the shelves harbour obscure titles (The Humour of Halland, and Anna Rogers' 1910 Why American Marriages Fail), so the walls echo less momentous events: one brusque regular brought back The Well of Loneliness with the comment "I'd need a chart to understand that", and two irate old ladies once blocked the entrance because their father had been omitted from A Select List of Lawyers Who Have Been Members of the Society Library 1754-1912.

And so it doubtless continues... Although it now allows lap-top computers in one room, one such user, novelist Meg Wolitzer, says that in fact she likes "the unplugged feel of the place: you almost feel as if you should have a doily on the computer. It's not jazzed up. I'm always enthusing about it, in the way that one did psychology or Buddhism back in the Seventies. It feels inviolable—you get the feeling of true richness just being there, roaming the shelves, those secret nooks, dodging intense female biographers. It's civil, plummy, with the illusion of leisure, as if you're back at college with all the time in the world."

Which answers—in a way that Sharpe might not have expected—the question which he was in the habit of writing at the front of his books: Ad quid venisti? To what have you come? As so often, the New World more than revisits the Old. Here is a glimpse of that Paradise to which Sharpe has gone.