I spent part of Saturday working at the NYPL branch on 5th & 42nd (it’s the best place to get a desk to work at in the entire city). Here are a couple of ramblings:
- In the morning, the reading hall was filled with tourists and people working with Mac computers. By mid-afternoon there were no more tourists and lots of people using PCs
- The library has a massive room (100′ x 30′ with 20′ ceilings) that contains exactly one book – but what a book – a Gutenberg bible:
- In that room the walls are covered by paintings of long-dead Americans, with the exception fo a corner where there are four landscape paintings. One is of the library itself and two are of random American scenes. However, the third is out of left field: it’s a Krieghoff of Quebec City circa 1850