In New York: Reading Between the Lions

By -- David Aikman

It is high noon. On the 42nd Street sidewalk outside Bryant Park two street musicians, both senior citizens, are plonking out "golden oldies" on electric guitar and zither. A few steps farther on a middle-aged black man sits on a wire wastepaper basket clutching a tattered Reader's Digest. He greets all passers-by with a cheery "Auf Wiedersehen!" But as Bryant Park comes to an end voices begin to hiss. "Wanna smoke, wanna smoke?" --twice, three, four times before a resolute reader reaches the top of the library steps and walks the hundred or so yards toward the marble lions guarding the columned portico.

Along the way stands Tyrone, nine-teenish, from uptown, calmly rolling his $1-apiece joints on a stone bench that he shares with a sleeping derelict. At least five pushers are holding up their plastic bags with marijuana and hashish for sale, and some customers light up on the spot. "The police used to raid early in the summer," explains Tyrone, "but you can get out in a couple of hours." He means be back on the terrace making sales, or in Bryant Park behind the building, where the pushers are so thick on the ground it takes a certain patience to refuse solicitations politely. Don't bother calling the police, either. Chances are the pusher will just plea-bargain the charge down to a $25 fine and a slight scratch on his record.

It is an average sunny lunchtime in fall at the New York Public Library. The great Central Building occupies two entire blocks of Fifth Avenue below 42nd Street. Its marble lions gaze out with dignity over trash and traffic alike, and the lofty portico proclaims the institution's origins in the heady days of 19th century hope and public benefice. "For the advancement of useful knowledge . . . dedicated to history, literature and the fine arts," the letters carved in stone declare. Inside, on 88 miles of shelves, is the greatest free collection of knowledge anywhere, and on any terms one of the five outstanding libraries in the world.

Just to walk through the marble corridors and briefly visit the different specialized divisions takes an hour. The Jewish collection contains the oldest known Hebrew printed book in the world, the Arba Turim (four columns) from Italy. Its librarians also possess a humdinger recipe for bagels that they gladly supplied by phone to a New York baker a few years ago when he called to ask. The Main Reading Room will produce, often in less than ten minutes, the most obscure tome requested, from Milton's Areopagitica to Sir Richard Burton's travels in Zanzibar.

For sheer accessibility nothing like it exists in any major library in the world. The service is completely free. It requires no card, no previous reference and no identification of any kind. That means, in America these days, that many rooms are plagued by the idle, the vicious, the criminal--and the literally unwashed.

"I make arrests every day," says Robert Quarg, a wiry peace officer whom the library authorities, with due literary grandiloquence, describe as the "principal bibliographic investigator." Quarg's turf is the whole library, all 5.5 million books, not to mention the 12 million prints, musical recordings, photographs and other documents housed 'by the N.Y.P.L.'s four research library buildings in Manhattan. Most of his time, though, is spent in the Central Building checking up on the reading rooms, corridors and special collections. "There's always something going on," he says. "One fellow stole books on chess. He left the building, went into a nearby peep-show house. I followed him there. I waited an hour inside the place for him to come out of the booth and finally I got him."

Quarg's "arrests" seldom reach court. Even if they do, the usual consequence is a $25 fine and a 15-day suspended sentence. Book thieves, in fact, are rarely caught and practically never go to jail. The security checks at the library's doors tend to be perfunctory. Strict legality favors the brazen. Due to fear of lawsuits for harassment, the library's hands are virtually tied. Guards have no legal right, for instance, to inspect women's purses less than eight inches long or to ask for explanations of suspicious-looking bulges under coat jackets. Besides, as Quarg notes, most of the book losses come through "mutilation." The thief simply rips out of a book a particular page or set of pages he finds useful or thinks he can sell. Everything is vulnerable, from telephone books to rare photographs. "Lawyers, businessmen, artists, actors, school principals--we've caught them all," says Quarg sadly. "That used to be our stamp collection," a library official remarks, pointing to a former display area. "All burglarized." Also stolen, but recovered: Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers from 1916 to 1969, and a small fortune in baseball cards, housed in the Spalding collection. The baseball card thief was caught when a guard saw him slipping the cards into a bubble gum box taped to his briefcase. He had $5,500 in cash on him as well as a cache of smiling infielders. Richard W. Couper, 56, president and chief executive officer of the N.Y.P.L. since 1971, is blunt about the reason for the ripoffs. "This is part of the amoral society," he explains coolly. "The swipers here know what they are doing." Couper adds: "We don't even have enough money to inventory the materials."

Or to keep the library open very much. The Central Building is now closed altogether on Thursdays, and the research libraries operate only 49 hours a week, sharply down from the 1970 figure of 78 hours. The problem is that the library, despite its name, is "public" in only one aspect: its availability to the multitudes. Only $2.5 million of its annual budget is contributed by the taxpayers of New York City. The other $17.5 million comes from private bequests, state and federal grants and donations from the public. It is woefully inadequate. Priceless books are disintegrating in the humidity because there is no air conditioning. A backlog of 200,000 acquisitions in storage may take two decades to process fully. There are only 19 guards for five stories of two block-lengths each. Says veteran Library Official Walter Zervas: "If ever there was a treasure house that's going to wrack and ruin, it's this one."

For the 613,000 students, scholars, workers and dilettantes who plunge into the institution's collections each year, there are plenty of shocks and threats. Tramps are sometimes to be found stripped naked in the men's room, washing their only set of clothes. This May a reader in the Main Reading Room was suddenly stabbed by the person sitting next to him. The assailant turned out to be a mental patient on day release from a Manhattan psychiatric institution. He wanted to be readmitted because the food was better there than at home, and resorted to violence to get attention. Especially in winter, platoons of tramps drift in from the neighborhood to sleep at the tables or mutter away at readers. Periodically the library staff wakens them, with a touching politeness, and asks them to leave--or come back only after taking a bath.

Signs in the reading room warn: "Please watch your wallets, purses, and other personal possessions." Readers are not warned about the sexual perverts who, a few times each month, harass women readers. There are the "mirror guys," men with pop-down mirrors on canes that they slide under reading-room tables, the flashers and the touchers.

There have even been obscene phone call experts who memorize the numbers of adjacent phone booths in the halls and ring up when a woman enters. Such incidents are often not reported. Comments veteran Library Security Officer Sivert Olenius: "We can't do a thing unless the person presses charges." Hardly anybody has the time, or the stomach, to do so.

Petty theft, book mutilation and other outrages, to be sure, have now come to seem somehow integral to the very notion of "public" in the mind of most library users. But the prevailing mood is still one of gratitude. A few days ago, Sidney Carroll, 66, a television writer and a library addict, leaned back from his notes on the turn-of-the-century Arms Tycoon Basil Zaharoff and reflected aloud: "One of the reasons I live in New York is this library. I love this room. It's hot, but not too much. The types outside the library have changed, but the caliber in side doesn't."

"Access," says President Couper, "is the name of the game. We probably do more here by way of public service than any other institution." Yet even if he had forgotten this, an inscription in the marble of Astor Hall, the library's main, high-ceilinged lobby, reminds visitors that the City of New York built the place in 1911 "for the free use of all the people." On New York's 42nd Street, that promise is all too literally being kept.

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