New York has finally turned on the spring sunshine, and so by lunchtime I was ready to break out of my office and get some fresh air.
I left the Midtown rush behind and headed to the (much) quieter surrounds of the New York Society Library located on East 79th Street on the Upper East Side. This wonderful slice of NYC history was founded 260 years ago, and has the distinction of being the oldest lending library in the City.
When it opened in 1754, the Library occupied space on the second floor of City Hall in Lower Manhattan. The War for Independence in 1774 interrupted operations and some of the Library's collection had to be relocated to St Paul's Church for safe-keeping, but a lot of it was lost or destroyed. By 1795 the Library had built up its collection to 10,000 titles and it relocated to bigger premises just off Wall Street. Napoloeon visited the Library in 1837, and Charles Dickens followed suit in 1842, but by then the Library already counted some celebrities amongst its membership, including Herman Melville (author of Moby Dick) and Washington Irving (Legend of Sleepy Hollow). A generous bequest from New York philanthropist Sarah Parker Goodhue in 1917 enabled the Library to purchase its current building on East 79th Street and its collection, and its membership database, continued to grow.
These days, the Library has about 3,000 members and a collection of over 300,000 volumes. In return for paying their annual dues, Library members can access the gorgeous reading rooms, a children's library, a vast catalogue of electronic resources, and an impressive calendar of events throughout the year.
Most of the library is off-limits to non members (which is totally fair enough), but fortunately non-members like me are still allowed to visit the exhibition gallery. And so it was that on my lunch break today I browsed the NY Society Library's latest exhibit , "From The Western Front and Beyond: The Writings of World War One".
The small exhibition has been timed to commemorate the 100th annivesary of what we know as "The Great War". According to the little postcard I pinched from the from the front desk, the exhibition seeks to share some of "the writings and literature that came from the trenches and bloodstained battlefields". The books and poetry anthologies on display were collected by Frank Bigelow, who was the New York Society Library's Head Librarian from 1895-1937. Clearly Bigelow had his finger on the pulse at the time of the Great War, and he recognised the great social change the world was undergoing. Bigelow immediately began padding out the Library's collection with books that had been written during and just after the war, and an assortment of these works is presented in the display cases around the exhibition.
I saw beautifully-maintained copies of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Gallipoli by John Masefield, as well as poetry anthologies by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon (all of which I had studied at high school). Other works were less familiar to me, including Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb (adapted into a film in 1957 starring Kirk Douglas), and Her Privates We by Australian author Frederic Manning, which is said to be the first book to have emerged from the First World War.
I was really pleased I got the chance to see this collection of works about what author Vera Brittain called "the depleted generation". I was equally impressed to learn that once the exhibition wraps up on 15 November, the books will be put back in circulation for the lucky Library members to borrow.
