Treasures of The New York Public Library

by William P. Kelly, Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries, and Declan Kiely, Director, Special Collections and Exhibitions

What constitutes a treasure? How is it defined? The word treasure has been around for centuries. Its origin lies in the Greek word (thēsauros), meaning “treasure, treasury, storehouse or collection.” The word was Latinized as thēsaurus, a term that Peter Mark Roget adopted in 1852 to describe his treasure trove of synonyms. It thence evolved from Anglo-French into Middle English as tresor. In the popular imagination, the word treasure conjures up images of chests overflowing with precious metals, jewels, or money. We may think of the quest for Captain Flint’s buried treasure in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, or the dragon Smaug curled atop his golden hoard in The Hobbit.

We can go as far back as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to find the term used in just this way, as in “The Pardoner’s Tale”: “This tresor hath Fortune unto us yiven / In myrthe and joliftee oure lyf to lyven” (“This treasure has Fortune unto us given / In mirth and jollity our life to live.”) In Chaucer’s moral exemplum on the dangers of cupidity, this interpretation of the meaning of “tresor” proves to be a fatal misunderstanding. The word functions as a similarly loaded term in “The Merchant’s Tale,” in which Chaucer tells us that “a wyf is the fruyt of his tresor” (“a wife is the best part of his treasure”).

“Treasuring Up”

Treasure, then, is a word often associated with opportunity, risk, danger, avarice, or mere contented acquisitiveness. But what does it mean in the context of The New York Public Library, and the permanent, rotating exhibition of the Library’s treasures that the Polonsky Foundation has underwritten? If the Library were to assemble and display a group of items based purely on their appraised value, it would be a gratuitous exercise lacking coherence. It is better to think of the Library’s treasures in the word’s verbal sense: “to hold as precious, to collect and store up something of value for future use.” This is the meaning that one encounters (courtesy of Milton) at the threshold of the Rose Main Reading Room on the Library’s third floor: “A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

We who serve at the Library are not so much concerned with determining what constitutes a treasure per se; rather, we are actively engaged in collecting, preserving, and making accessible the widest possible range of research materials, art, and artifacts. Our purpose is to “treasure up” those materials for present and future generations of researchers and visitors.

Rising to Truth

Abbot Suger, the 12th-century superior of the Basilica of Saint-Denis—the burial place of French monarchs—was responsible for recording and describing the treasures of the cathedral. In the course of his work, Abbot Suger wrote in De Administratione (Of Administration, ca. 1144–1148) that “the dull mind rises to truth through that which is material.” As Kenneth Clark noted in Civilisation, his landmark television documentary series, Suger’s observation “was really a revolutionary concept in the Middle Ages. It was the intellectual background of all the sublime works of art of the next century and in fact has remained the basis of our belief in the value of art…”

The New York Public Library is, in every sense, a republic of books. But we preserve so much more than books. We operate in the world of materiality, in all the fullness that the word suggests—illuminated manuscripts, painted miniatures, prints, photographs, sculpture, audio and moving images, and, in recent times, a vast amount of born-digital materials. Most often, these artifacts have to do with language—the written transmission of knowledge and information. Sometimes we value these materials for their beauty or rarity, rather than their contents or meaning. At other times, meaning is everything: How did these words change history, lead to actions, inspire beliefs? How did this choreographer advance the possibilities of modern dance? How did this painting, or map, or photograph change people’s perceptions of the world around them?

Research is never complete—it is always about finding missing pieces, pursuing avenues of inquiry that appear opaque at the start of the process, and then making hitherto unseen connections. The essence of research is exploring winding paths in order to make unexpected discoveries. It is in the nature of the Library to value and encourage the open-ended research of these winding paths. To that end, we acquire widely and deeply, following our governing principles of access and utility. We collect in the belief that all knowledge is worth preserving, because what we know today and discover tomorrow are fundamentally rooted in the preservation of the material documenting our shared human experience.

Access to a Shared Heritage

The permanent exhibition in Gottesman Hall of the Library’s treasures provides us with an opportunity to showcase this vast range, and to elucidate for our visitors—whether they are first-time tourists or researchers who have spent decades engaged in scholarly study—the crucial role the Library plays in collecting, preserving, and providing access to our shared cultural heritage.

While all items in our vast collections have value, this exhibition is meant to highlight some of our more than 46 million objects that stand out as especially rare, significant, beautiful, or unusual—our treasures. We invite our visitors to ask such questions as: What is it that makes a particular object special? Is it its age, or its rarity? Its uniqueness or beauty? Is it of great scholarly importance? Does it provoke strong emotions? Is it a curiosity? Has it made a significant impact as an art or literary form? Does it demonstrate the potential to enhance the lives of future generations? Is there an extraordinary story it tells about the workings of science or the culture in which we live?

The exhibition and this book provide a unique opportunity for visitors to view treasures that have heretofore largely been hidden. The Library is, indeed, a treasure house of sorts, a museum of acquisitions. But, more compelling than that, it is a living library and not a reliquary. Our treasures are both objects to be viewed, admired, and appreciated, and also scholarly resources that are available to researchers in our reading rooms. They help to demonstrate the Library’s mission to inspire lifelong learning, advance knowledge, and strengthen our communities.

The archives of the museum of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris are inscribed with these lines by the poet Paul Valéry:

It depends on those who pass

Whether I am tomb or treasure;

Whether I speak or am silent.

The choice is yours alone.

Friend, do not enter without desire.

We invite all our visitors and readers to view the Library’s treasures in the same spirit—as a portal to further inquiry and discovery, some of which may, in turn, become tomorrow’s treasure.