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Tuesday, 17 May 2011 15:49

A Library’s Treasures, From Gutenberg to Malcolm X

A Gutenberg bible on display as part of the New York Public Library's 100th anniversary exhibition. A Gutenberg bible on display as part of the New York Public Library's 100th anniversary exhibition. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“One of the five greatest public libraries in the world” is the boast made at a new exhibition celebrating the centennial of the New York Public Library’s august building on Fifth Avenue. And if we are inclined to question the claim, it is only because the institution’s distinctiveness is scarcely suggested by putting it in a class with the Library of Congress, the British Library, the National Library of France and the Russian State Library.

As we learn in this show, “Celebrating 100 Years,” the New York Public Library is the only one of this group that was not established by a national government. Unlike many Old World museums, it also is not an “imperial” institution, many of whose holdings were gathered through plunder and conquest. In addition, it was not established, as many such libraries were, to reflect the character of a nation; it was actually intended to help shape that country’s character.

Moreover, that public mission gained its force from private visions. The Public Library was built on distinguished collections assembled by individuals of great wealth, discernment or passion. The Astor and Lenox libraries formed the core of this new library in 1895; artifacts gathered by Arthur Alfonso Schomburg in the 20th century’s early decades form the core of the library’s invaluable Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. And many of its other research collections have similar origins.

You can sample the results here. The show’s curator, Thomas Mellins (who created a compelling exhibition about the history of Lincoln Center in 2009), has said that his primary goal was “to show the depth and breadth of the Library’s remarkable collections.”

There are cuneiform tablets and typewriters, a Gutenberg Bible and 1960s political broadsheets; Kepler’s diagram of the structure of the universe and women’s dance cards from 19th-century balls; T. S. Eliot’s typescript of “The Wasteland” with emendations by Ezra Pound, and a Russian translation of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” Also on view are the walking stick of Virginia Woolf’s that her husband found floating in a river four days after she deliberately drowned herself and Beethoven’s sketches as he worked on the Scherzo of the “Archduke” Trio.

But what ties the library’s research collections together? And what themes does the exhibition itself reveal? That is less clear.

Some artifacts are of profound historical importance, like Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten manuscript of “The Declaration of Independence.” Others are of interest because of associations with recent political history, like a collection of condoms distributed by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in the 1990s.

Some are illuminating, like Charles Dickens’s marked-up copy of “David Copperfield,” in which he excised paragraphs and inscribed prompts that he used in public readings from the book. And his letter opener fully merits the adjective “Dickensian” with its quirky peculiarity and demonstrative eccentricity: the handle is made from the paw of Dickens’s pet cat Bob, and the blade is engraved “C. D. In Memory of Bob 1862,” the year of the cat’s death.

But other objects make you wonder not just about the show’s selections, but also about the library’s curatorial strategies. Is Terry Southern’s typewriter of collectible importance given that his most celebrated credit may have been as a screenwriter for “Easy Rider” (1969)? Did curators at the Rare Book Division have anything in mind other than ironic mischief when they preserved a massage-parlor handbill from the 1970s-era Times Square advertising “The Library” and promising “7 beautiful Librarians to service you”? The exhibition explains the handbill as part of the library’s mission of acquiring ephemera, but collecting also makes an assertion that objects will have a future value. Is that the case here? Why?

The exhibition’s own choices can also leave us confused. Two central display cases, for example, are used to emphasize the collection’s variety with playful comparisons, noting that the library has items ranging “from art that changes how we see the world” (a 1936 Picasso etching of a turkey) “to art we see every day” (a swatch of cloth from Wesley Simpson Custom Fabrics); everything “from images that invite us to look” (a magazine about pornographic videos) “to images that cause us to look away” (an 1863 photograph of the dead lying on a Gettysburg battlefield).

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