Deborah, Jonathan F. P., Samuel Priest, and
Adam R. Rose Main Reading Room
General Research Division, Third Floor, Room 315
Phone: (917) 275-6975
Fully accessible to wheelchairs
The Deborah, Jonathan F. P., Samuel Priest, and Adam R. Rose Main Reading
Room is a majestic public space, measuring 78 feet by 297 feet —roughly the
length of two city blocks—and weaving together Old World architectural elegance
with modern technology. The award-wining restoration of this room was completed
in 1998, thanks to a fifteen million-dollar gift from Library trustee Sandra Priest
Rose and Frederick Phineas Rose, who renamed the room in honor of their
children.
Here, patrons can read or study at long oak tables lit by elegant bronze lamps,
beneath fifty-two foot tall ceilings decorated by dramatic murals of vibrant skies
and billowing clouds. Since the General Research Division’s opening day on May
23, 1911, vast numbers of people have entered the main reading room. Literary
figures such as Norman Mailer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elizabeth Bishop, E. L.
Doctorow, and Alfred Kazin have cited the division as a major resource for their
work. In one of his memoirs, New York Jew, Kazin described his youthful
impression of the reading room: “There was something about the . . . light falling
through the great tall windows, the sun burning smooth the tops of the golden
tables as if they had been freshly painted—that made me restless with the need to
grab up every book, press into every single mind right there on the open shelves.”
In the North Hall of the main reading room, patrons request and receive books
from the Library’s stacks or offsite storage facility. Self-service photocopiers are
available as well as Copy Services, where readers can order color copies and
scanned documents. The North Hall is a designated quiet zone, where researchers
can work and study without distraction.
The reading room’s South Hall provides Internet access and word processing to
the public on thirty-one desktop computers. Patrons can also apply for and receive
a New York Public Library Card. South Hall provides an area for patrons to make
digital photographs of materials and utilize the Library’s audio-visual materials.
Throughout the whole of the reading room, patrons with their own laptops can
connect for free to the Internet through the Library’s Wi-Fi. Readers can consult
the open-shelf reference collection, which includes standard works in all fields
collected by the Library, as well as general resources such as dictionaries,
encyclopedias, biographies, and indexes. This collection alone encompasses over
forty thousand volumes and is more comprehensive than the holdings of the
reference collections of many smaller libraries. A floor plan of the reference
collection is available.