A few days ago I showed up ten minutes late for a luncheon appointment. My excuse? I stopped to read bronze plaques on the sidewalk. Luckily, my dining companion was a publisher, and when I explained the delay, he not only understood but joined me after lunch to read the plaques with me.

There are 96 set into the sidewalk on 41st Street between Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, and it is known at Library Way. Each is uniquely and exquisitely fashioned and carries a quotation from the world’s great authors.

As I learned, the project was initiated in 1996 by the Grand Central Partnership, the New York Public Library and New Yorker Magazine. This group created a panel of librarians and literati to cull the quotations. They then engaged Gregg LeFevre, a prominent artist, to produce fitting designs into which to set the quotes. In 2003 Mayor Michael Bloomberg dedicated this stretch of street and named it Library Way.

But that’s just the beginning, for the plaques are the first step to transform this relatively dreary sidestreet into a destination, sort of New York City’s answer to San Antonio’s River Walk, but built completely around the theme of books.

An article in 2000 by Martha Schweitzer, then President-Elect of the New York Chapter of the Special Libraries Association, projected the city’s vision for Library Way:

“At Madison Avenue and 41st Street, a building under construction will open soon as a 60 room boutique hotel with a theme which offers a clue – it will be called the Library. Each floor will have a different subject – social science, geography, Slavic languages – the rooms will be stocked with books, and the room key will be a library card. This hotel was recently featured in an article in The New York Times. A new office tower is in the works for the space across Madison Avenue. You are seeing the first fruits of a plan to transform East 41st Street between Fifth and Park Avenues into a gracious promenade called ‘Library Way.’

“As you stand on 41st Street and look toward Fifth

Avenue, you see the grand New York Public Library building presiding over the head of the street. The plan for Library Way proposes to frame the vista to and from this elegant building by adding trees, sculpture, street lamps, and vendor bookstalls similar to those found on Paris walks. An effort will be made to encourage the retail stores along the street to imaginatively feature products and services that benefit from proximity to Library users and related cultural activities. On weekends, the Grand Central Partnership will seek to close the street for a market and festivities.“

The Library Hotel is open for business and, true to its concept, the home page of its website boasts that each floor “is dedicated to one of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System: Social Sciences, Literature, Languages, History, Math & Science, General Knowledge, Technology, Philosophy, The Arts and Religion.”

But if you do nothing else, stroll west on East 41st Street and read the plaques. A lot of impatient New Yorkers may complain that you’re in the way. Just flip them the bird in true New Yorker fashion.

To view all the plaques, click here, then click on the individual ones to enlarge and read them. If this causes you to be late for a lunch date, just forward this blog to your dining companions – they’ll understand.

Richard Curtis
Plaque images © G. LeFevre 1998

I take pride in my sense of humor, but sometimes it can get rather heavy-handed. That was demonstrated about ten years ago when I was invited to the New York Public Library to give a talk to librarians about the future of books.

The venue was the Map Room, an exquisite gilded salon that epitomized an age that revered the printed book. The attendees, solemn acolytes of the Dewey Decimal System, fit perfectly into the decor. My subject, you will not be surprised to hear, was the digital revolution, and to illustrate it I brought with me some CD-ROM discs. On the podium I had piled a large number of impressively thick tomes. I then produced the discs and declared that all the content of those books and more could fit onto a few of the slim shiny objects I held before them. I declared that a day would come when brick and mortar institutions known as libraries might become irrelevant. Whereupon I gestured broadly at the magnificent building and said, “I’ll bet this joint would make a great condo.”

One hundred librarians volubly sucked in their breath and gaped at me as I had torn a page out of Audobon’s Birds of America and blown my nose in it.

“Just kidding, folks,” I said sheepishly.

Actually, I wasn’t. As print media – newspapers and magazines and books – enter the endangered lists, so do the brick and mortar venues that service them: magazine stores, book shops – and libraries. The contents and catalogues of most libraries are accessible online from practically anywhere in the civilized world. The only reason patrons must go them is to check out and return their physical books. But as libraries acquire e-books, even that function becomes irrelevant. As I recently wrote, E-libraries don’t have a locus. Their patrons have no loyalty to a specific branch; they can traverse cyberspace to locate and download the e-book they wish to “borrow”. Yes, libraries (like bookstores) have managed to remain relevant in the digital age by offering a warm and vibrant social center for scholars, students and book lovers. And many provide computers for patrons to search the Worldwide Web even though they could do as much from their home, office, or a café in Paris.

These ruminations are reinforced in Millions of Books, but No Card Catalog, a New York Times article by Noam Cohen describing the recent legal settlement of the lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and a publishers group against Google, which since 2002 has been scanning millions of books into its colossal digital archive. Cohen suggest that “digitization of books is ending the distinction between circulating libraries, meant for public readers, and research libraries, meant for scholars.”

Cohen’s article ends on a hopeful note: “The digital-rights class-action agreement has the potential to make physical libraries newly relevant. Each public library will have one computer with complete access to Google Book Search, a service that normally would come as part of a paid subscription.” He cites an NYU professor, Thomas Augst, as asserting that Google is “creating a new reason to go to public libraries, which I think is fantastic. Public libraries have a communal function, a symbolic function that can only happen if people are there.”

Okay, you can hold up on the wrecking ball for now. But I have dibs on that 44th floor penthouse on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

RC

Overdrive, a leading digital media service provider specializing in e-library sales, reports a record-busting 5.3 million checkouts, according to Publishers Weekly. How high over the bar did OverDrive fly? How about a 76% increase over 2007!

Most popular download? Here’s a hint: the first word is “Stephenie” and the second is “Meyer”.

The content wasn’t just e-books but music and video as well. Some 150,000 items in these media are available in OverDrive’s catalogue, which is offered to some 8500 libraries. The company’s founder Steve Potash, a great visionary and prime mover in the e-book industry, deserves kudos for navigating through the many challenges of creating an e-business model for libraries. Think about some of them. Unlike brick and mortar libraries, e-libraries don’t necessarily have a locus. Are their patrons loyal to a specific branch or can they traverse cyberspace to find the item they want to borrow? How does a library “lend” an e-book or tune or video? How does a borrower “return” the checked-out item? How do publishers make money on e-books they place with libraries? Do they sell just one “copy” or, if’ it’s a hot bestseller, do they sell multiples? Once an e-book is sold to a library, is that it? Forever? Or does the license have to be renewed?

It’s worth spending a few minutes exploring the OverDrive website to learn about the firm’s resources.

RC