Last week I was in New York for the ABAA New York Antiquarian Book Fair and also the Manhattan Vintage Book & Ephemera Show. As always, New York offered amazing bookstores and a buzzing city.

I had some spare time, and in keeping with the book theme, decided to visit the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. For me, this building is the very best of what a library can be; beautiful architecture, unique books and a great children’s book collection.

Walking down Fifth Avenue, my first glimpse of the library was the iconic lions (top left), Patience and Fortitude. The library lions are instantly recognizable and mark the library as a special place. On this visit, there were two Lego replicas of the beloved lions (top right) inside the building – definitely worth a look for Lego lovers!

The NYPL is the second largest library in the US and the third largest in the world, with at least 53 million items. The building was designed by John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings between 1897 and 1911 and is stunning example of Beaux-Arts design. At the time of construction, the library was the largest marble structure ever built in the US.

In a corner of the children’s library I discovered an exhibit of the real Winnie the Pooh animals: Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, Tigger and Pooh. The animals belonged to Christopher Milne, son of the author, A.A. Milne and the books were donated to the New York Public Library in 1987 by the publisher of the Pooh books (aside: if you don’t know the origins of Winnie the Pooh, they are fascinating).

When you look at these animals you can see they were well loved, with worn patches and bits of fur missing, this makes them that much more endearing . Knowing that the stories were based on treasured and well-loved toys makes them even better to read, I can’t wait to rediscover these tales with my daughters.

The real animals of Winnie-the-Pooh: Piglet

Guest post compliments of Maria Hutchison, AbeBooks Account Manager for our rare and collectible segment.

This is a unique reading list – these books were all written by librarians and most of them were recommended to us by librarians. If any profession is well qualified to write books then librarians truly fit the bill.

Librarians are loyal customers of AbeBooks and we tend to listen when they speak. But it was interesting to see so many librarians recommend Casanova’s autobiography – were they trying to tell us something? This famous Italian adventurer and lover was a librarian in the household of the German nobleman Count Waldstein. The authors on this list range from the top dogs at the Library of Congress to folks who have worked at the national libraries of Argentina, France and Sweden, and people who have checked books in and out at public and school libraries.

We decided to exclude Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book. This one-time librarian at Peking University is perhaps the most widely read of all librarians who wrote but it was under extraordinary circumstances (although it is now thought the book was ghostwritten). Our featured book (pictured at left) is Hemlock and After by Angus Wilson, illustrated by Ronald Searle, and was a bestseller in 1952. Wilson was a librarian in the British Museum.

Librarian Lit

Star Man’s Son
Andre Norton

A post-apocalyptic tale from 1952 – Norton was a librarian in Cleveland and the Library of Congress.

Books in My Baggage
Lawrence C. Powell

Clark Powell was a librarian at UCLA and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

Jill
Philip Larkin

Larkin was a librarian at the University of Hull. Jill is a novel about life in Oxford during WWII.

A Winter’s Love
Madeleine L’Engle

L’Engle was a volunteer librarian in New York. A scarce novel about a troubled marriage.

Collected Poems
Marianne Moore

This modernist poet, noted for her wit, worked in the New York Public Library in the 1920s.

Higher Power of Lucky
Susan Patron

Patron won a Newbery Award for this children’s book. She worked at the Los Angeles Public Library.

The Feud
Thomas Berger

A novel about conflict in small town 1930s America – Berger was a librarian and journalist.

The Wild Old Wicked Man
Archibald MacLeish

MacLeish, Librarian of Congress from 1939-1944, was also a playwright, journalist, lawyer & statesman.

The Giant’s House
Elizabeth McCracken

Written by a former public librarian, this novel (about a librarian) was a National Book Award nominee.

The Mouse & the Motorcycle
Beverly Cleary

Cleary worked as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington, before writing children’s books.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Dee Brown

An agriculture librarian at the University of Illinois, Brown’s 1971 book remains a non-fiction classic.

Ill-Starred Captains
Anthony J. Brown

Brown was a former librarian from the State Library of South Australia.

Dr Brodie’s Report
Jorge Luis Borges

Borges was a director of Argentina’s National Public Library. This is a collection of 11 short stories.

Miss Julie
August Strindberg

Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at Sweden’s National Library.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler

This novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Tyler is a former librarian and bibliographer.

Out Stealing Horses
Per Petterson

An ex-librarian & a bookseller, Petterson’s novel was one of the NY Times’ books of the year in 2007.

Story of the Eye
Georges Bataille

Histoire de L’Oeil is a controversial novel from 1928. Bataille was an archivist at France’s National Library.

Vertical Poetry
Roberto Juarroz

Juarroz was head of Bibliotechnology & Informational Science at the University of Buenos Aires.

Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast
Bill Richardson

This Canadian is a Master of Library Science. This book won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humor.

The Legate’s Daughter
Wallace Breem

Breem was a legal manuscripts librarian in London – this novel is a Roman kidnap adventure.

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!
Laura Amy Schlitz

A novel set in medieval England in 1255. Schiltz is a school librarian in Maryland.

Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society
Mary Ann Shaffer

A true bookperson, Shaffer worked as a librarian but also in bookselling and publishing.

Story of My Life
Giacomo Casanova

This great lover was a librarian in Count Waldstein’s household where he wrote his autobiography.

Chewing the Scenery
Davina Elliott

Davina worked for London’s Westminster Libraries and still volunteers at St James’s Library.

Featuring a stern, turtlenecked librarian named Betty Glover, this is nearly five minutes of surreal, spoof workout advice for librarians, made in 1987 by an Arizona State University student. While disturbingly sizeist and focused on the horror of fatness, the video is also totally delightful, and liberal in its use of Van Halen, Huey Lewis and the News, Tears for Fears, Billy Idol, Devo and other 80s musical greats. The tape claims to offer librarians a way to fight slack muscles and flab while in their element, with such exercises as the vertical drawer pull, and horizontal drawer pull, and rapid-fire stapling.

Weird. I do enjoy that the dictatorial and not-to-be-messed-with Betty Glover comes with her own riding crop. The staff won’t be getting lazy on her watch.

Enjoy this surreal bit of Wednesday library fun.

And for more librarian-themed goodness, check out our list of Literature from Librarians: Great Reads Written by the Experts.

A treat for the fine booklover, or anyone who enjoys the excellent artistry of bookbinding: The Kelliegram Binding.

Kelliegram bindings often involved intricate leather work, such as leather inlays or onlays to create an image, a scene, or a mosaic effect. It was common for the Kelliegram binders to choose an engraving from the body of the book and recreate it in leather for the cover image.

More from the Brynmawr library:

Kelliegram bindings were one of many innovations of the English commercial binding firm of Kelly & Sons. The Kelly family had one of the longest connections in the history of the binding trade in London, having been founded in 1770 by John Kellie, as the name was then spelled. The binding firm was carried on by successive members of the family into the 1930s. William Henry Kelly significantly developed the company in the first half of the nineteenth century, followed by William Henry, Jr., Henry, and Hubert Kelly, who took control in 1892, taking the firm into the twentieth century.

In the 1880s, Kelly & Sons began to use cloth with the reverse side showing for the sides of half-leather bindings. The reverse cloth had a more interesting and less artificial appearance, with an additional advantage of not being affected by water. The development that came to be known as Kelliegram was one of the bindery’s most notable, and the popularity continues today as demonstrated by the prices Kelliegram bindings command at auction and in the rare book trade.

To see more fine examples of leather inlays, enjoy our article Mosaic in Morocco: Inlaid Leather Bindings. To explore other legendary bookbinders and their bookbinding techniques, check out Bound to Be Beautiful: Best of the Bookbinders.

Shell branded road map from 1939, an example of what may be found in the collection

The LA Times reports that the Los Angeles Public Library has become the beneficiary of massive map donation courtesy of a real estate agent’s recent find.  The agent was put in charge of clearing out the belongings of a man who had occupied the building but was not the owner.  He had been living in the 948 square foot cottage under an arrangement in the deceased owner’s will.  With the clause now fulfilled, the new owners planned to clear the house out, knock it over and subdivide the ample lot, which is where things got interesting.

Crammed inside this small cottage were tens of thousands of maps that the occupant had collected over his life.  The real estate agent, whose mother was a library science professor, couldn’t bear to throw out the collection, so he invited Glen Creason, the LA Library map librarian, to inspect and retrieve the collection which dwarfs the library’s own map archive.

“He has every type of map imaginable. There’s a 1956 pictorial map of Lubbock, Texas. He’s got a 1942 Jack Renie Street Guide of Los Angeles,” Creason said. “He has four of the first Thomas Bros. guides from 1946. Those are very hard to find. The one copy we have is falling apart because it’s been so heavily used. We had to photocopy it.”

The trove was apparently more of a hoard than a cataloged collection, but still contained some really neat pieces such as a 1592 map of Europe, a 1918 National Map Co.’s “Official Paved Road” guide, and countless city and county folding maps which, when added to the LA Library’s existing collection, will give the institution one of the top five map archives in the United States.

It is expected that more gems will be unearthed as the library goes about cataloging and organizing the maps, a process which could take as long as a year. The library also stated that they may have to apply for a grant to hire the manpower to sort through the massive collection, which will take upwards of 600 feet of shelving to store.

To think: had it not been for a keen real estate agent this all might have been donated to the city dump instead.

Learn more about Collectible Maps and Cartography

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

“This list is a starting point,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. “It is not a register of the ‘best’ American books – although many of them fit that description. Rather, the list is intended to spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives, whether they appear on this initial list or not.”

We hope you will view the list, nominate other titles, and most importantly, choose to read and discuss some of the books on this list, reflecting America’s unique and extraordinary literary heritage, which the Library of Congress makes available to the world.

Here they all are, chronologically, spanning 1751-2002. Interesting that only one book is from the 21st century.

“Experiments and Observations on Electricity” by Benjamin Franklin (1751)
“Poor Richard Improved and The Way to Wealth” by Benjamin Franklin (1758)
“Common Sense” by Thomas Paine (1776)
“A Grammatical Institute of the English Language” by Noah Webster (1783)
“The Federalist” by anonymous (1787)
“A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible” by anonymous (1788)
“A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America” by Christopher Colles (1789)
“The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D.” by Benjamin Franklin (1793)
“American Cookery” by Amelia Simmons (1796)
“New England Primer” by anonymous (1803)
“History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark” by Meriwether Lewis (1814)
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving (1820)
“McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer” by William Holmes McGuffey (1836)
“Peter Parley’s Universal History” by Samuel Goodrich (1837)
“The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass (1845)
“The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
“Moby-Dick; or The Whale” by Herman Melville (1851)
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
“Walden; or Life in the Woods” by Henry David Thoreau (1854)
“Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman (1855)
“Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy” by Louisa May Alcott (1868)
“The American Woman’s Home” by Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1869)
“Mark, the Match Boy” by Horatio Alger Jr. (1869)
“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain (1884)
“How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis (1890)
“Poems” by Emily Dickinson (1890)
“The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane (1895)
“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum (1900)
“Harriet, the Moses of Her People” by Sarah H. Bradford (1901)
“The Call of the Wild” by Jack London (1903)
“The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
“The History of Standard Oil” by Ida Tarbell (1904)
“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair (1906)
“Pragmatism” by William James (1907)
“The Education of Henry Adams” by Henry Adams (1907)
“Riders of the Purple Sage” by Zane Grey (1912)
“Tarzan of the Apes” by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1914)
“Family Limitation” by Margaret Sanger (1914)
“New Hampshire” by Robert Frost (1923)
“Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams (1923)
“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes (1925)
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
“The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner (1929)
“Red Harvest” by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
“Joy of Cooking” by Irma Rombauer (1931)
“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
“How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie (1936)
“Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures” by Federal Writers’ Project (1937)
“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
“Our Town: A Play” by Thornton Wilder (1938)
“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck (1939)
“Alcoholics Anonymous” by anonymous (Bill W. – Bill Wilson) (1939)
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
“Native Son” by Richard Wright (1940)
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith (1943)
“A Treasury of American Folklore” by Benjamin A. Botkin (1944)
“A Street in Bronzeville” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)
“The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” by Benjamin Spock (1946)
“The Iceman Cometh” by Eugene O’Neill (1946)
“A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams (1947)
“Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown (1947)
“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” by Alfred C. Kinsey (1948)
“Howl” by Allen Ginsberg (1956)
“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger (1951)
“Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White (1952)
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison (1952)
“Fahrenheit 451″ by Ray Bradbury (1953)
“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac (1957)
“Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand (1957)
“The Cat in the Hat” by Dr. Seuss (1957)
“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee (1960)
“Catch-22″ by Joseph Heller (1961)
“Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert E. Heinlein (1961)
“Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson (1962)
“The Snowy Day” by Ezra Jack Keats (1962)
“Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak (1963)
“The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan (1963)
“The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin (1963)
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)
“Unsafe at Any Speed” by Ralph Nader (1965)
“In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote (1966)
“The Double Helix” by James D. Watson (1968)
“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown (1970)
“Our Bodies, Ourselves” by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1971)
“Cosmos” by Carl Sagan (1980)
“And the Band Played On” by Randy Shilts (1987)
“Beloved” by Toni Morrison (1987)
“The Words of Cesar Chavez” by Cesar Chavez (2002)

But in short, SABAM, a Belgian organization responsible for collecting royalties owed to music composers, authors and publishers has begun contacting libraries in Belgium, demanding they be paid royalty fees every time a volunteer reads books to children.

No, seriously. Read the whole article and be stunned.

What blows my mind is not only the colossal, almost cartoonish greed, eclipsing Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch (both fictional bogeymen, at that) put together, but also the astounding short-sightednesses of it all. When we read books to kids, we help instil a love of books in them, and thereby create a booklover. A booklover who will one day have money of their own, and buy books.