A Nice Little Office

I’m writing this in the south reading room of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. Almost all the other occupants of this glorious, cavernous space (about the size of a football field, with a fifty-two-foot frescoed ceiling) are looking at their computers. Almost no one, myself included, is consulting a library book. Beneath our feet and extending under adjacent Bryant Park are about 125 miles of shelving that holds the library’s core research collection of more than four million volumes. Although I and a few others occasionally request an item, the whole retrieval system is pretty moribund. Still, it’s only 10:30 on a Saturday morning, and the 642 seats at the enormous oak tables (twenty-two feet long and four feet wide, so that you never feel crowded) are slowly filling up. By early afternoon, this room will be filled to near-capacity with what people have been doing here since its opening in 1911: reading, writing, thinking, dreaming, or merely killing time in one of the most sumptuous public spaces in America. Many or most of these people could be doing at home or at their local Starbucks what they’re doing here. And yet they keep coming.