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4 BIOGRAPHY “inhibition”, or some interplay of the two. The ramifications of the binary could be analysed by varying the stimuli or playing off one stimulus against another (for example, an electric shock combined with feeding might become a conditional stimulus for salivation). So far, so neat and tidy. The truth, however, was that Pavlov did not stick to this set of intellectual procedures. Here Todes’s biography proves not merely definitive, but redefining. Pavlov was in fact a highly intuitive thinker, and an ambitious one: he was always striving to make the biggest claims his “facts” would allow. His co-workers conducted hundreds of experiments to his precise instructions; his role was to survey the data they gathered and pick out, as Todes puts it, “the signal amid the noise”. The accumulation of experimental data actually made underlying patterns harder rather than easier to discern, which is where the art of interpretation came in. Pavlov often used metaphor to make the jump from analysis to synthesis. He liked to characterize the digestive system as a “chemical factory” and the mind as a “machine”; later on, as his attention switched from the mechanistic particulars to the psychical whole, he referred to the cortex as a “grandiose mosaic, a grandiose signalizing switchboard”. The problem lay not only in the difficulty of identifying clear patterns even in apparently “objective”, quantitative data. It also had to do with Pavlov’s own intellectual restlessness. In the West, he has often been taken to have adopted an extremely mechanistic stimulus– response model of mental processing. He himself played his part in constructing this image, not least through the anthropomorphism of much of his research on dogs. But, as Todes notes, the biggest contribution to this misapprehension was made by his first translators, who erroneously rendered his key experimental concept as “conditioned” rather than “conditional” reflex. In combination with the stereotype of dogs salivating to bells, this has made Pavlov come across as a narrow determinist and as a scientist preoccupied with external phenomena rather than underlying causes. In America, he has been domesticated as a variety of behaviourist. But this is a very misleading view. One part of the stereotype is correct: Pavlov and his co-workers spent a great deal of their time getting dogs to salivate (though their preferred stimuli were the buzzer and the metronome, not the bell). But, as Todes shows in an exposition both lucid and nuanced, that was merely the starting point. Dogs for Pavlov were experimental subjects rather than machines for replicating results. He and his colleagues developed close working relationships with their animals (even as they tortured them). Control groups were unthinkable: all the dogs were individuals. This allowed Pavlov to conduct elaborate sequences of experiments on the same dog, with multiple combinations of stimuli, but quickly forced him to confront an inconvenient fact: dogs, like human beings, were different. Excitation and inhibition were not universal mechanisms, but varied in their intensity and interrelations from one animal to the next. By 1924, Pavlov enjoyed excellent lab conditions, including the purpose-built “Towers of Silence” where dogs could be isolated from extraneous stimuli, but even this apparently most neutral of environments affected dogs in profoundly different ways. A psychiatrist, perhaps, would have Ivan P. Pavlov, 1930, by Mikhail Nesterov welcomed this evidence of irreducible psychic variation, but a physiologist and determinist, such as Pavlov always remained, badly needed to find a way of accounting for it. The second half of Pavlov’s life may be regarded as one long search for a way of embracing the complexity without abandoning core mechanistic positions. In the early days of Pavlov’s research “factory”, the main solution was to cling to a notion of the “normal” dog – in other words, one who could remain “happy” while having its digestive system permanently damaged by a pancreatic fistula. But in due course, Pavlov began to relish the variety of “nervous types” that he observed in his animals. Once again, intuition played a leading part: he gravitated instinctively to the Hippocratic model, turning the four temperaments into nervous types. But he was too good an observer to believe that this adequately reflected the experimental data, and the list of acknowledged “intermediate types” lengthened inexorably. Metaphors and value judgements again provided some succour: Pavlov confidently categorized individual dogs as “strong” or “weak”, and built his analysis of their nervous systems around that assessment. But if his assistants produced results that did not fit existing categories, he simply increased the number of categories – or, more radically, the number of variables. In the early 1930s, for example, he dropped a quiet bombshell by telling his co-workers that nervous types could no longer be explained in terms of the excitation–inhibition binary, instead introducing the triad of strength, balance and lability. The moment of final synthesis was endlessly deferred, which caused him moments of acute self-doubt in the last decade of his life, just as his public authority was hardening into complete impermeability. The underlying irony was that, from approximately the mid-point of his life, this worldrenowned physiologist was in fact going after the psyche. Even if he still thought nervous impulses the best way of explaining the mind’s functioning, he was starting to push against the limits of his earlier explanatory models. In earlier days, he had taken “conditional reflexes” as a synonym for what the psychologists called “associations”. He attempted to prove the point by establishing in dogs longer chains of reflexes: not just light-equalsmeat, but also metronome-equals-lightequals-meat. But these experiments did not yield satisfactory results: Pavlov had to admit that associations were broader than reflexes, and that the cumulative study of individual reflexes could not account for the “systematicity” of the nervous system. In the last decade of his life, as he came to acknowledge that the psychic whole was more than the sum of its nervous parts, his work took a distinctly psychiatric turn. No doubt this was partly the result of intellectual one-upmanship: he wanted to use his physiological toolkit to show the established specialists in the human mind the limits of their own aetiological speculations. But Pavlov’s interest in psychiatric abnormalities was also born of the sheer opportunism of any good researcher. Quite simply, a number of his dogs were nervous wrecks. In 1924, at least a couple of the animals were traumatized by their narrow escape from drowning during the Leningrad flood. Others were broken by the programme of experiments to which they were subjected – vivisection, isolation, electric shocks, jarring sounds. Earlier in his career, Pavlov might have discarded such animals as no longer “normal” and fit for purpose. Now they had become his most intriguing subjects: he analysed mental illness as a “break” caused by intolerable burdens on the nervous system. He was also more explicitly extrapolating from animals to humans. In the mid-1930s, he held court at “Clinical Wednesdays”, where he examined two or three patients and then delivered a diagnosis, with psychiatrists in silent and sceptical attendance. Pavlov’s dogs also drew him into the natureversus-nurture debate. It was plausible to suppose that variation in dogs’ nervous types could be explained by heredity and by their different life experiences before entering the clutches of his lab assistants. In the early 1920s, Pavlov endorsed research on mice that seemed to demonstrate the inheritance of acquired characteristics, only later to have to retreat from this position when the experimental results were shown to be flimsy. A few years later, with the creation, thanks to Bolshevik largesse, of a bucolic experimental station outside Leningrad, he had the opportunity to investigate heredity in a more controlled and convincing manner. Dogs could be reared in controlled environments as “free” or “imprisoned”, and multiple generations could be studied to investigate inherited characteristics. Pavlov well understood that he would not live to see the results of the heredity project, but his research agenda of the 1920s and 30s made him more voluble than hitherto on the broader applications of his work. Science, in his view, could be an agent of social improvement on both fronts – nature and nurture. Subscribing to the pan-European eugenicist wisdom of the age, he argued that a more precise understanding of inherited characteristics in dogs would allow human beings to make more informed choices in their own breeding; so deeply held was this belief that Pavlov reacted to the death of his son Vsevolod by blaming himself for passing on the Mendelian inheritance of pancreatic cancer. As for nurture, he was caught up in the same dialectic of free will and determinism as the Bolsheviks themselves. Although a determinist to the tips of his fingers, he unquestionably believed in his own agency – not least in his capacity to stand above “facts” and remake them into scientific laws. He was also convinced that a correct understanding of the mechanisms of the brain would allow people to transcend their own determined existence and “direct energies” in a rational and wilful way. In this light, the attempts made by a few of Pavlov’s party-minded co-workers of the 1930s to bring the teachings of the great man in line with the dialectical and voluntarist spirit of the age were not entirely without foundation. Even in his mid-eighties, Pavlov had not lost the capacity to expand his intellectual horizons and to question his own assumptions, although he still exploded at others who dared to challenge him. If he had lived to be a hundred, as both he and the Soviet propaganda industry hoped, perhaps he would have become aMarxist, or at least the dialectical materialist that Pravda had claimed him to be on his eightieth birthday. It is certainly arguable that there was influence in the other direction: the Bolshevik ideal of remaking man through a variety of stimuli – from excitation (inspiration and incentives) to inhibition (terror) – was more than a little Pavlovian. Daniel Todes has spent more than twenty years with his subject, and has evidently approached his task with the same dedication that Pavlov kept up through his many decades in the lab. Todes’s sources range from the whimsical and self-revealing “journal” with which Pavlov wooed his future wife in 1879 to NKVD surveillance reports on his mood more than half a century later, from documents on the student Pavlov’s very first research into nervous control of the organs to taped interviews with his co-workers several decades after his death. The result is history of science at its intricate best. TLS OCTOBER 30 2015
page 5
BIBLIOGRAPHY 5 Scott Sherman’s subtitle is slightly coy: his book isn’t about the fight to save just any old library. He’s talking about the revered New York Public Library, one of the world’s great scholarly archives and research institutions. Located at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, this block-long Beaux Arts building, established in 1895 and comparable in scale to the British Museum, is guarded by two monumental stone lions nicknamed “Patience” and “Fortitude”. In Sherman’s pages these modest virtues are pitted against the institutional vices of hubris and condescension. Essentially, Sherman, a contributing writer for the Nation, provides a scathing account of how the library’s well-intentioned but highhanded overlords wasted millions of dollars – and who knows how many man-hours – on an ill-conceived renovation project. To put it crudely, to “save” the NYPL its president and trustees decided to get rid of all the books. They didn’t plan to just load up scores of dumpsters, then tip them into the East River. Instead, trucks would transport 3 million books to an offsite facility in Princeton, New Jersey. After the shelves were emptied, work crews would then gut the seven floors of the library’s underground stacks and replace them with – well, it’s never entirely clear what they would replace them with. The new reader-friendly “circulating” library, however, would be more open and inviting, with airy public rooms and lots of computer consoles and the usual electronic stuff. Public outreach, rather than specialized research, would be paramount. In short, an “elitist” scholar’s library would be transformed into a twenty-first-century media centre, where New Yorkers could check out e-books and drink cappuccino and chai latte. Once this “Central Library Plan” (CLP) was completed, the NYPL would resemble, more or less, a gigantic internet café. Before you start to splutter with tweedy indignation, bear in mind that the New York Public Library has been struggling financially ever since the Second World War. More than most public libraries in America, it depends, as Sherman makes clear, “on a precarious mix of private philanthropic funds, an endowment, and city, state and federal aid that is usually too little for the institution’s grand responsiblities and ambitions”. Consequently, when facing any financial shortfall, the library has regularly eaten into its capital. When, in the 1950s and 60s, even more money began to be needed, it started to “deaccession” its assets. Initially, that meant selling its most important paintings, among them works by Reynolds, Constable and Turner. In 2005, the NYPL even auctioned off Asher B. Durand’s beloved “Kindred Spirits”, a Hudson River School masterpiece that depicts the artist Thomas Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant standing on a bluff of the Catskill Mountains, with gloriously wild landscape surrounding them. This vision of the American sublime was a special gift from the artist’s daughter to the NYPL, which is located in Bryant Park. After the art was gone, the NYPL looked for other sources of revenue. For eight years, the then president, Vartan Gregorian, found an angel in the very rich and generous Brooke Astor. But Gregorian stepped down in 1988 and his successor, Fr Timothy Healy, died after only three-and-a-half years in office. A Columbia University administrator, Paul LeClerc, was chosen to become the new president and, in Sherman’s words, soon began “to think seri Secret stacks MICHAEL DIRDA Scott Sherman PATIENCE AND FORTITUDE Power, real estate, and the fight to save a public library 256pp. Melville House. £15.99 (US $20.75). 978 1 61219 429 5 ously about a radical overhaul at the NYPL involving real-estate sales, consolidation, and fund-raising”. As LeClerc set out to remake the institution, Sherman emphasizes that by 2008 many “seasoned curators, archivists and librarians left the NYPL under a voluntary ‘separation incentive program’”, even as, according to investigations by a fellow reporter, Charles Petersen, “the ranks of executives and ‘strategists’ had ballooned”. To help jump-start his Central Library Plan, LeClerc enlisted various wealthy businessmen, notably the real-estate moguls Marshall Rose and Stephen A. Schwarzman. The latter – described by Sherman as “a character out of the pages of Balzac or Dreiser” – would pledge to donate $100 million to the NYPL in exchange for having the building renamed in his honour. Michael Bloomberg, then the Mayor of New York, would contribute an identical amount from the city’s treasury. Yet more money would be generated by selling off three important Manhattan branch libraries, starting with the Donnell Library (exceptionally strong in foreign language material). It was later discovered that that midtown property – for which the NYPL received $59 million – was almost certainly undersold: just the penthouse apartment in the luxury tower that replaced the Donnell went on the market for $60 million. “By 2011”, Sherman writes, “the NYPL was reeling from budget cutbacks and staff reductions.” Instead of spending $300 million or more on the CLP, he counters that “prudent cost-cutting measures, combined with coolheaded management, were urgently needed: bloated executive salaries might have been trimmed (NYPL vice-presidents are paid $315,000); foundations could have been approached for support; a public campaign to stabilize City funding could have been initiated. LeClerc might even have consulted New Yorkers about a plan to sell one facility” – the Science, Industry and Business Library on 34th Street – “and channel the proceeds back into the NYPL’s daily operations”. But as Sherman concludes, “none of these measures . . . were ever considered: the CLP was the only way forward”. At this point, with the “starchitect” Norman Foster hired (for an initial $9 million) to come up with the redesign, LeClerc stepped down and moved to Paris. He was succeeded by Anthony Marx, the former president of Amherst College, who seconded his predecessor’s proposed renovations. In Marx’s view, the Central Library Plan would “replace books with people; that’s the future of where libraries are going”. Initially, the major news media welcomed a trendy reimagining of a decaying institution. But then critics began to emerge. Scholars bristled at the loss of the historic book stacks and no one believed that a volume could be retrieved from storage in twenty-four hours. Two historians, Joan Scott and Stanley Katz, issued a protest letter to halt the CLP, which they saw as “a misplaced use of funds in a time of great scarcity”. Their petition was signed by some 2,000 writers, academics and public intellectuals, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie and Tom Stoppard. The NYPL, it was pointed out, was already a highly democratic institution, among the few scholarly research libraries open to anyone. Rather than disembowel a national treasure, wouldn’t it be better to spend the money on revamping the neighbourhood branch libraries, desperate for basic amenities? To the trustees’ dismay, just a month before she died, the elderly Ada Louise Huxtable, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal, blasted the proposed Foster designs. She also declared that “a research library is a timeless repository of treasures, not a popularity contest measured by “Don’t Gut Our Lions” by Art Spiegelman head counts, the current arbiter of success”. The New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman chimed in by dubbing the CLP “a potential Alamo of engineering, architecture and finance”, whose monetary underpinnings were “opaque”. The cartoonist Art Spiegelman contributed a drawing of an evil-looking leopard, its jaws ripping through a book, while it crouches on the back of a dying stone lion. In response to this barrage of protest, the library called up support from its big guns: the famous trustees, the influential friends in city government, an expensive public relations firm. The CLP critics, though, displayed far greater media savvy, and were both passionate and relentless. Crucially, the then mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio proved sympathetic to their cause. The plans, he proclaimed, seemed “to have been made without any forethought to the building’s historical and cultural integrity”. Soon after de Blasio’s election, the Central Library Plan was, finally, quietly shelved. Even Marx then admitted it had been a mistake. Nonetheless, the underground stacks – though not destroyed – had already been stripped of their books. The current plan, Sherman writes, is to build additional underground book storage adjacent to the Schwarzman building, to go ahead with the sale of the Science, Industry and Business Library, and to fully renovate the Midtown Manhattan Library, which is popular with students. We shall see. Patience and Fortitude tells a complicated story, one packed with lots of names, financial data and reporting by many individuals, yet its narrative moves briskly and grippingly along. While no one here, Sherman emphasizes, can be viewed as a villain, many of the people involved with the CLP – nearly all of whom refused to speak to him – acted with arrogance and a lack of transparency. For instance, the trustees made crucial decisions in “executive session”, which meant that no minutes were kept and no outsiders were present. “Between 2006 and 2014”, Sherman notes, “the NYPL did not sponsor a single public meeting about the CLP.” And, so far as one can tell from this book, at none of the meetings did the higher-ups at the library ever seriously consult with the librarians, curators and other members of the working staff. This attitude, if nothing else, testifies to uneasiness, coupled with rank paternalism. While the large board of trustees did include a few scholars (notably, the historian Robert Darnton) and some recognized intellectuals (such as the Editor of the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers), its power players were mainly real-estate and hedge-fund oligarchs. If the NYPL wanted their money, they expected to get their way. Also, in the rush to recreate the NYPL, the planners denied that they would be undermining – almost literally, it turns out – an architectural landmark that has been called “America’s finest classical revival building”. Structural engineers determined, quite late in the game, that it would be both extremely difficult and expensive to remove the seven levels of stacks around which the library was constructed. In the process, the very foundation of the original structure might be compromised. Finally, the CLP was a product of the early days of book digitization. Who would need access to those smelly old volumes and all that crumbling paper when everything would soon be available on little screens? But, as bibliographical scholars remind us, there are orders of information only available to those who examine the physical books and documents. Consider size alone. When viewed on an e-reader, a John James Audubon elephant folio looks no bigger, and a miniature book no smaller, than an ordinary paperback. Above all, to place one’s trust in pixels or cyberspace is a fool’s game. Hard copy remains the only truly reliable backup. Even though the Plan was ultimately scuttled, the New York Public Library still faces serious financial difficulties. To address them, Sherman tells us, several proposals have been made. For example, patrons might pay some small sum to enter the library as they do the subway. An even more radical notion might be to reduce the salary for upper management: in his first year as president, Anthony Marx cost the library nearly $800,000 and the compensation for his lieutenants is comparably exaggerated. Some have even suggested that the NYPL be taken over by the federal government and made an adjunct to the Library of Congress. Whatever happens, one hopes that large-scale planning in the future will be more open and democratic – and give priority to books over cheque books. TLS OCTOBER 30 2015

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

5

Scott Sherman’s subtitle is slightly coy: his book isn’t about the fight to save just any old library. He’s talking about the revered New York Public Library, one of the world’s great scholarly archives and research institutions. Located at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, this block-long Beaux Arts building, established in 1895 and comparable in scale to the British Museum, is guarded by two monumental stone lions nicknamed “Patience” and “Fortitude”. In Sherman’s pages these modest virtues are pitted against the institutional vices of hubris and condescension.

Essentially, Sherman, a contributing writer for the Nation, provides a scathing account of how the library’s well-intentioned but highhanded overlords wasted millions of dollars – and who knows how many man-hours – on an ill-conceived renovation project. To put it crudely, to “save” the NYPL its president and trustees decided to get rid of all the books. They didn’t plan to just load up scores of dumpsters, then tip them into the East River. Instead, trucks would transport 3 million books to an offsite facility in Princeton, New Jersey. After the shelves were emptied, work crews would then gut the seven floors of the library’s underground stacks and replace them with – well, it’s never entirely clear what they would replace them with. The new reader-friendly “circulating” library, however, would be more open and inviting, with airy public rooms and lots of computer consoles and the usual electronic stuff. Public outreach, rather than specialized research, would be paramount. In short, an “elitist” scholar’s library would be transformed into a twenty-first-century media centre, where New Yorkers could check out e-books and drink cappuccino and chai latte. Once this “Central Library Plan” (CLP) was completed, the NYPL would resemble, more or less, a gigantic internet café.

Before you start to splutter with tweedy indignation, bear in mind that the New York Public Library has been struggling financially ever since the Second World War. More than most public libraries in America, it depends, as Sherman makes clear, “on a precarious mix of private philanthropic funds, an endowment, and city, state and federal aid that is usually too little for the institution’s grand responsiblities and ambitions”. Consequently, when facing any financial shortfall, the library has regularly eaten into its capital. When, in the 1950s and 60s, even more money began to be needed, it started to “deaccession” its assets.

Initially, that meant selling its most important paintings, among them works by Reynolds, Constable and Turner. In 2005, the NYPL even auctioned off Asher B. Durand’s beloved “Kindred Spirits”, a Hudson River School masterpiece that depicts the artist Thomas Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant standing on a bluff of the Catskill Mountains, with gloriously wild landscape surrounding them. This vision of the American sublime was a special gift from the artist’s daughter to the NYPL, which is located in Bryant Park.

After the art was gone, the NYPL looked for other sources of revenue. For eight years, the then president, Vartan Gregorian, found an angel in the very rich and generous Brooke Astor. But Gregorian stepped down in 1988 and his successor, Fr Timothy Healy, died after only three-and-a-half years in office. A Columbia University administrator, Paul LeClerc, was chosen to become the new president and, in Sherman’s words, soon began “to think seri

Secret stacks

MICHAEL DIRDA

Scott Sherman PATIENCE AND FORTITUDE

Power, real estate, and the fight to save a public library 256pp. Melville House. £15.99 (US $20.75).

978 1 61219 429 5

ously about a radical overhaul at the NYPL involving real-estate sales, consolidation, and fund-raising”. As LeClerc set out to remake the institution, Sherman emphasizes that by 2008 many “seasoned curators, archivists and librarians left the NYPL under a voluntary ‘separation incentive program’”, even as, according to investigations by a fellow reporter, Charles Petersen, “the ranks of executives and ‘strategists’ had ballooned”.

To help jump-start his Central Library Plan, LeClerc enlisted various wealthy businessmen, notably the real-estate moguls Marshall Rose and Stephen A. Schwarzman. The latter – described by Sherman as “a character out of the pages of Balzac or Dreiser” – would pledge to donate $100 million to the NYPL in exchange for having the building renamed in his honour. Michael Bloomberg, then the Mayor of New York, would contribute an identical amount from the city’s treasury. Yet more money would be generated by selling off three important Manhattan branch libraries, starting with the Donnell Library (exceptionally strong in foreign language material). It was later discovered that that midtown property – for which the NYPL received $59 million – was almost certainly undersold: just the penthouse apartment in the luxury tower that replaced the Donnell went on the market for $60 million.

“By 2011”, Sherman writes, “the NYPL was reeling from budget cutbacks and staff reductions.” Instead of spending $300 million or more on the CLP, he counters that “prudent cost-cutting measures, combined with coolheaded management, were urgently needed: bloated executive salaries might have been trimmed (NYPL vice-presidents are paid $315,000); foundations could have been approached for support; a public campaign to stabilize City funding could have been initiated. LeClerc might even have consulted New Yorkers about a plan to sell one facility” – the Science, Industry and Business Library on 34th Street – “and channel the proceeds back into the NYPL’s daily operations”. But as Sherman concludes, “none of these measures . . . were ever considered: the CLP was the only way forward”. At this point, with the “starchitect” Norman Foster hired (for an initial $9 million) to come up with the redesign, LeClerc stepped down and moved to Paris. He was succeeded by Anthony Marx, the former president of Amherst College, who seconded his predecessor’s proposed renovations. In Marx’s view, the Central Library Plan would “replace books with people; that’s the future of where libraries are going”.

Initially, the major news media welcomed a trendy reimagining of a decaying institution. But then critics began to emerge. Scholars bristled at the loss of the historic book stacks and no one believed that a volume could be retrieved from storage in twenty-four hours. Two historians, Joan Scott and Stanley Katz, issued a protest letter to halt the CLP, which they saw as “a misplaced use of funds in a time of great scarcity”. Their petition was signed by some 2,000 writers, academics and public intellectuals, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie and Tom Stoppard. The NYPL, it was pointed out, was already a highly democratic institution, among the few scholarly research libraries open to anyone. Rather than disembowel a national treasure, wouldn’t it be better to spend the money on revamping the neighbourhood branch libraries, desperate for basic amenities?

To the trustees’ dismay, just a month before she died, the elderly Ada Louise Huxtable, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal, blasted the proposed Foster designs. She also declared that “a research library is a timeless repository of treasures, not a popularity contest measured by

“Don’t Gut Our Lions” by Art

Spiegelman head counts, the current arbiter of success”. The New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman chimed in by dubbing the CLP “a potential Alamo of engineering, architecture and finance”, whose monetary underpinnings were “opaque”. The cartoonist Art Spiegelman contributed a drawing of an evil-looking leopard, its jaws ripping through a book, while it crouches on the back of a dying stone lion.

In response to this barrage of protest, the library called up support from its big guns: the famous trustees, the influential friends in city government, an expensive public relations firm. The CLP critics, though, displayed far greater media savvy, and were both passionate and relentless. Crucially, the then mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio proved sympathetic to their cause. The plans, he proclaimed, seemed “to have been made without any forethought to the building’s historical and cultural integrity”. Soon after de Blasio’s election, the Central Library Plan was, finally, quietly shelved. Even Marx then admitted it had been a mistake. Nonetheless, the underground stacks – though not destroyed – had already been stripped of their books. The current plan,

Sherman writes, is to build additional underground book storage adjacent to the Schwarzman building, to go ahead with the sale of the Science, Industry and Business Library, and to fully renovate the Midtown Manhattan Library, which is popular with students. We shall see.

Patience and Fortitude tells a complicated story, one packed with lots of names, financial data and reporting by many individuals, yet its narrative moves briskly and grippingly along. While no one here, Sherman emphasizes, can be viewed as a villain, many of the people involved with the CLP – nearly all of whom refused to speak to him – acted with arrogance and a lack of transparency. For instance, the trustees made crucial decisions in “executive session”, which meant that no minutes were kept and no outsiders were present. “Between 2006 and 2014”, Sherman notes, “the NYPL did not sponsor a single public meeting about the CLP.” And, so far as one can tell from this book, at none of the meetings did the higher-ups at the library ever seriously consult with the librarians, curators and other members of the working staff. This attitude, if nothing else, testifies to uneasiness, coupled with rank paternalism. While the large board of trustees did include a few scholars (notably, the historian Robert Darnton) and some recognized intellectuals (such as the Editor of the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers), its power players were mainly real-estate and hedge-fund oligarchs. If the NYPL wanted their money, they expected to get their way. Also, in the rush to recreate the NYPL, the planners denied that they would be undermining – almost literally, it turns out – an architectural landmark that has been called “America’s finest classical revival building”. Structural engineers determined, quite late in the game, that it would be both extremely difficult and expensive to remove the seven levels of stacks around which the library was constructed. In the process, the very foundation of the original structure might be compromised.

Finally, the CLP was a product of the early days of book digitization. Who would need access to those smelly old volumes and all that crumbling paper when everything would soon be available on little screens? But, as bibliographical scholars remind us, there are orders of information only available to those who examine the physical books and documents. Consider size alone. When viewed on an e-reader, a John James Audubon elephant folio looks no bigger, and a miniature book no smaller, than an ordinary paperback. Above all, to place one’s trust in pixels or cyberspace is a fool’s game. Hard copy remains the only truly reliable backup.

Even though the Plan was ultimately scuttled, the New York Public Library still faces serious financial difficulties. To address them, Sherman tells us, several proposals have been made. For example, patrons might pay some small sum to enter the library as they do the subway. An even more radical notion might be to reduce the salary for upper management: in his first year as president, Anthony Marx cost the library nearly $800,000 and the compensation for his lieutenants is comparably exaggerated. Some have even suggested that the NYPL be taken over by the federal government and made an adjunct to the Library of Congress. Whatever happens, one hopes that large-scale planning in the future will be more open and democratic – and give priority to books over cheque books.

TLS OCTOBER 30 2015

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