The most popular books of the year was The Help by Kathryn Stockett, and Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen with respectively 15 and 8 cumulative weeks at the top. The Help had been released in 2009, was a #1 best seller in 2010, and had a resurgence in 2011. The prolific James Patterson was at the top for three different books (Tick Tock, Now You See Her and Kill Alex Cross).
The New York City Book Awards, established in 1995-96, honor books of literary quality or historical importance that, in the opinion of the selection committee, evoke the spirit or enhance appreciation of New York City. This was the inaugural year for the Hornblower Award, given to an excellent New York City-related book by a first-time author.
new york times books of the year 2011
Although all this is positive news, we cannot be complacent. We must prepare ourselves for the challenges ahead, which are many. These days the very notion of what a library is or should be is evolving. Even the notion of what books are or might become is being transformed. We are committed to our heritage and history - which our 258th year and 244th annual meeting inevitably bring to mind - and to the strengths of our collection and our enlightened readers. At the same time we recognize that our younger generations, for whom we are determined to preserve our great heritage, have new and different means of communication, not to mention tastes and interests.
You may have read recently of the major changes underway at the New York Public Library, which plans to close two of its largest midtown libraries, consolidate them at the Stephen A. Schwartzman Building at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, send offsite millions of books in its stacks under Bryant Park, and increase and reconfigure its public space to accommodate more people and more computer terminals. The Society Library does not have issues of that scale, but we must continue to reflect on where we want to be in another ten, twenty, or fifty years. We have been doing so in a thoughtful way, but it is not an easy task, and we look to all our members for input on what we can and should become.
The past year has seen some important developments and notable milestones for our Board of Trustees. First, it is with some sadness that I report that our longtime board member Lyn Chase stepped down, but I am equally pleased that she has accepted the board's unanimous designation of her as Trustee Emeritus. Lyn has been a great supporter of the Library in so many ways, serving on the Book Committee, the Development Committee and the Lecture and Exhibition Committee. She has a great appreciation of the literary arts, particularly poetry, and she has generously donated her superb collection of poetry books, which we look forward to installing in the Whitridge Room. Her tact, good taste, good humor, good judgment and philanthropy, all conveyed with remarkable modesty and kindness, have been a real asset to the Library. We are grateful for all her contributions and know she will continue to give us wise counsel and encouragement.
As Lyn leaves us, we welcome two new members to the board - or, more precisely, welcome back one and welcome another. First is Barbara Goldsmith, a highly valued former member of our board, the author of many excellent biographies and other books, and a longtime member of the board of the New York Public Library. We are excited to have Barbara and her energy, ideas and insights back with us. We are also pleased to welcome to the board Bill Bardel, who with his wife Penny have been members of the Library for many years and have been generous donors, including through an exemplary book fund. Bill is a Man for All Seasons: from his days as a Rhodes Scholar to his present involvement as an independent board member of the Hudson River Savings Bank, he has brought probity and intellectual curiosity to all his endeavors.
Finally, I am pleased to honor two of our long-serving board members. Jean Parker Phifer has been with us for twenty years and, as an architect and motive force on our Building and Renovation Committee, has guided us through our highly successful recent renovations that have revitalized our physical plant. And Linn Cary Mehta has served us for ten years, as inaugural head of our Member Relations Committee and one of the most dedicated users of our collection and facilities. I am grateful to Jean, Linn, and our entire board for their support, hard work and leadership, which have guided us through challenging times and will, with our exceptional staff, ensure a bright future.
These are the words of Anne McDonough, an archivist and photographer who lives in Washington, D.C. Ann is the daughter of Donald and Kristin McDonough, members of the New York Society Library since 1970. This poignant memory of her early years using this appears on Anne's blog, The Archiphotovist. Her father, Dr. Donald McDonough, is a talented book discussion group instructor and a former professor at Connecticut State University, and her mother is Kristin McDonough, Director of the Science, Industry and Business Library, New York Public Library. During 2011-12, Dr. McDonough taught John Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso. Over the last year, our other discussion groups have included B. J. Rahn on crime in the arts; member Blanche Siegal and our Sunday afternoon "Tea and Trollope"; James Kraft on Edith Wharton (timed to coincide with the Library's exhibition); Jeffrey Johnson on Proust; and George W. Martin on three early operas of Verdi. This spring two book discussion group members stopped me in the hallway, enthusing about their just finished Wharton group, and suggested some other authors for the Library to teach: George Eliot and Jane Austen. I, of course, added that there are many other contenders for the list - Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, to name but a few.
Our members continue to appreciate our events and other offerings, if attendance figures and positive feedback in the lobby are measures of success. Currently the Library has 3,080 members, with over 800 being individual members. In calendar year 2011 we circulated 86,725 books, a slight increase from 2010, and just slightly above the average of the last decade. More than four thousand are in circulation at any time. For the first time in a decade, a nonfiction title, Stacey Schiff's Cleopatra, was the most widely borrowed back in our Library. Other popular nonfiction titles included books by David McCullough, Nora Ephron, Eric Larson, Edmund De Waal, and Laura Hillenbrand. Popular fiction books included Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question. Our circulation numbers through the time of this report's publication in 2012 show that members continue to be heavy borrowers of the Library's print books.
The top five subject areas for books cataloged by Laura O'Keefe's cataloging department were history and travel; biography and collective biography; literature (including poetry, criticism and drama); social sciences; and arts and recreation. Book funds strengthen our purchasing power each year and provide welcome relief to the operating budget. I am happy to report that these special funds helped purchase 25% of our books for the permanent collection. Thank you to the members and friends of the Library who established these named funds.
After a very productive career at the Society Library, Jane Goldstein retired in December 2011. Jane started at the Library as a circulation assistant, became Head of the Circulation Department, and then became Assistant Head Librarian to finish out her years at the NYSL. Members, Trustees, and staff will all miss Jane very much. Carolyn Waters became Assistant Head Librarian and continues to oversee the Writing Life series, underwritten by Jenny Lawrence. Along with the appointment of Andrew Corbin as Acquisitions and Reference Librarian, Katie Fricas works with Sara Holliday in the new position of Events and Circulation Assistant; Erin Schreiner is Special Collections Librarian; Jennifer Hanley-Leonard is Children's Librarian; Matthew Bright is a Systems Assistant/Catalog Librarian, and Caitlin McCarthy is a Bibliographic Assistant.
In the calendar year 2011, 639 of the 4,200 volumes added to the Library were gift acquisitions, according to Steve McGuirl, our Head of Acquisitions. Many recent publications were among them, including copies of books we can use as added copies for new titles in heavy circulation and copies for the ongoing booksale in the front stairwell. Deborah Pease donated Elizabeth Bishop: Objects & Apparitions, a recent catalog of the Elizabeth Bishop paintings exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery on 5th Avenue. Weston Naef, Curator Emeritus, J. Paul Getty Museum, donated a copy of his book, Carleton Watkins: the Complete Mammoth Photographs. This fine book includes 600 glorious pages of photographs of views of Yosemite, San Francisco, and the Pacific Coast, as well as railroads, mines, and lumber mills throughout the West, along with scholarly essays.
Also noteworthy in the last year was the completion of the processing and cataloging of the gift books from Romano I. Peluso, which we recognized in a recent issue of Library Notes. The gifts to the Peluso Family Collection include titles by Beatrix Potter, J.R.R. Tolkien, Theodore Roosevelt, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill, Wendy Wasserstein, David Halberstam, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Graham Greene, Horton Foote, and a substantial selection of works by Virginia Woolf and J. K. Rowling. Many wonderful books from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, including titles by Jeremy Taylor, Gilbert Burnet, Washington Irving, and Benjamin Franklin, were donated to the Library's special collections by Joel Chasis Roll and Sarah Chasis. The Chasis sisters inherited them from their mother, Barbara Parker Chasis, and are part of the Van Wagenen Family Collection. 2ff7e9595c
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