Reading room at the NYPL

There is something innately appealing to book lovers about a secret place to read and write. This article in the New York Observer blows the cover on just such a place — a secret writers’ room, hiding in plain sight at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library, the Allen Room.

“‘It’s like Aladdin’s cave,'” author Alexander Rose, a current Allen Room initiate, told the Observer, “‘I looked it up, and it actually did exist.'”

“Founded in 1958 as a tribute to Frederick Lewis Allen, the historian and editor of Harper’s Magazine, the room serves as a workspace to a rotating group of authors,” reports the Observer. “Rubberneckers take note: The door is locked at all times, and access is restricted to those who have book contracts, a photocopy of which must accompany requests for a key card.”

Says the report,

In a 1971 essay for New York, Avery Corman described the Allen Room as ‘elite stuff,’ a place where ‘Saul Bellow probably couldn’t get in.’ Six years later, Noemie Emery spun an Allen Room tale of sex and insanity for Publisher’s Weekly, counting among the room’s residents a German countess who wrote of her helicopter rescue from an asylum and the granddaughter of a famous psychiatrist who spent her library hours investigating lesbian witches in Staten Island. Betty Friedan, who wrote a portion of The Feminine Mystique in the room, was known to drive people nuts with her noise.

Though it may seem forbidding in it’s exclusivity, with only 9 cubicles, Allen Room liaison Jay Barksdale told the Observer that “40 to 50 people hold key cards at any one time, and if a term of access officially ends after one year, many people request (and receive) extensions. ‘We don’t want to create obstructions,’ he explained.”

The Observer writes that on closer inspection the Allen Room is a remarkably bland, unglamorous place, with little to distract working writers, “Novelist Jennifer Vanderbes notes, ‘An exciting week at the Allen Room is when a non-member rattles the door handle trying to get in.'”

No exciting Norman Mailer-style hi-jinx here. But, there are benefits, as Barksdale notes, “it might be the last place on earth where silence is respected.”