Three-hundred-thousand Books to Browse

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The New York Society Library, New York City’s oldest library (founded in 1754), is currently housed in a lovely limestone townhouse at 53 East 79th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues on the Upper East Side. Behind our elegant façade all are welcome to share in our mission to “connect books and people in an environment of intellectual freedom”. No appointment is necessary to come in and use our Reference Room, where you can have any of our approximately three-hundred-thousand volumes in our general collection brought down to you to consult and read.

However, membership does have its privileges. Members not only have access to quiet study rooms, an extensive and expertly staffed Children’s Library, the ability to check out items, and access to thousands of magazines, journal articles, reference resources, ebooks, and audiobooks electronically, but also have access to ten levels of open, browsable stacks. Our recently completed renovations not only gave members a beautiful new reading room, the Cooper Room on our fourth floor, but also increased our space for new books in our stacks, with a whole level of stacks added, the Robert E. and Judith O. Rubin Book Stackfor Fiction, Language and Science. Additionally, a former rear yard space was enclosed and equipped with two levels of compact storage, and now houses approximately thirty-thousand older holdings, including our French language collection. Books from these stacks, the Jean Weiller Leigh Bookstacks, can be requested from the circulation desk. These new stack spaces complement eight additional floors of stacks devoted to fiction, social sciences, history, religion, literary criticism, biography, and the arts.

The ability to browse stacks with hundreds of thousands of titles, from the mid-Nineteenth century to the present is one that our members cherish. If you would like to find out why, stop by and request an on-demand tour from our Members’ and Visitors’ Services staff at the front desk, Monday through Friday, or stop by most Saturdays or Sundays between 2:00 and 4:00 for a more in-depth docent-led tour. If you want to browse the stacks yourself, or read or study in our members’ only spaces, you can also purchase a Day Pass. The cost of the Day Pass will be deducted from membership fees should you then desire to become a member and make browsing our stacks and reading in our spaces a part of your regular routine.

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