Cornell University Library Staff Web

The New York Public Library is celebrating its centennial this year and what better way to commemorate that milestone than to produce a book. In collaboration with Penguin Classics, NYPL has done just that in a book prosaically titled Know the Past, Find the Future, The New York Public Library at 100. This is not your typical official history to commemorate a milestone but a love song, composed of a series of moving arias produced by over one hundred artists, musicians, authors, politicians, actors, and educators. Each was given the opportunity to choose an item or two from NYPL’s magnificent collections and to reflect on what they mean to them. This 368 page volume contains their stories and fabulous photographs of the authors and their choices in situ at the library. The entire testimonial gathering is worth the read, but a few are particular standouts. First, is author Ian Buruma’s choice of Mao’s Little Red Book. More than six billion copies of the book were printed in a little more than a decade. What makes NYPL’s copy so rare is that it belonged to Lin Biao, the compiler of this book, an one-time heir-apparent to Mao Zedong. But Lin Biao lost his life in a plane crash over Mongolia. Speculation is that the crash was no accident. Promoting the cult of personality, Lin Biao eventually threatened Mao’s absolute power and, following his death, “disappeared” from Chinese history; his image was erased from photographs, posters, books; his words were denounced and he achieved a sort of notoriety by being coupled with Confucius as an enemy of the state. As Ian Buruma concluded in his essay, “All that is left is a shabby little book in a cheap plastic cover.” NYPL is its resting place. A second testimonial from novelist Jonathan Franzen is to John James Audubon’s The Birds of America. Audubon’s birds were often depicted as lifeless, Franzen noted, because the artist painted in a time before binoculars, and to get a good likeness the birds had to be killed and posed. But Audubon’s illustration of Carolina parakeets, now extinct, is full of life. There are several reasons why this bird died out: deforestation, competition with other species, their hunting by farmers. What accelerated their demise was that when one bird was shot, the rest of the flock came crowding to their aid, instead of fleeing to safety. As Franzen noted “I was left to imagine that the reason they [the Carolina parakeets] looked so natural was that Audubon had had an unusually good opportunity to study their postures at close range, after he’d shot the first of them.” My last call out is from novelist Colum McCann, who chose a first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He was able to view this very fragile copy under careful supervision in the Berg Collection reading room at 42nd and 5th Ave. When the book was put away, McCann noticed a tiny flake from one of the pages had fallen to the table: “It would soon become dust. I stared at it. And then I did what any heartsick lovesick booksick wordsick worldside joycesick fool would do. I ate it.” 

Have a healthy and productive week,

Anne R. Kenney
Carl A. Kroch University Librarian
Cornell University Library
201 Olin Library
Ithaca, NY 14853-5301
Tel. 607-255-3393
ark3@cornell.edu

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