The Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library.

A hearing for the Central Library Plan (CLP)—originally scheduled for yesterday, October 31—to discuss any alternatives to the plans for the potential sale of the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL) and the renovation of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, has been rescheduled to December 13th.

While the future of the New York Public Library is up in the air, a new well-researched article by Stephen Eide in the City Journal, offers the history of the NYPL thoughout its building and formation in the twentieth century. Here are some facts pulled from his article, to examine New York Public Library history by the numbers:

• The New York Public Library Main Building took 12 years and $9 million dollars to be built.
• The Main Building’s classical design by Carrère and Hastings, an architectural firm whose principals had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, incorporates 14 kinds of marble, including some from the same quarry that supplied marble for the Parthenon.
• The two pink marble lions were named Patience and Fortitude by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
• The seven stories and 88 miles of cast-iron and steel bookshelves—an engineering marvel that holds up the Rose Main Reading Room—on a 1911 cover of Scientific American. They are closed to the public.
• The cost of building the average branch library in the early twentieth century was $80,000, or about $2.2 million in today’s dollars.
• Whole books have been written about the library’s collection, which now boasts some 45 million items (51 million counting the branch holdings), including a Gutenberg Bible and a 1623 Shakespeare First Folio from the Astor and Tilden libraries.