John Jacob Astor died in 1848. He dedicated a cool four hundred thousand dollars, estimated at about eleven million in today’s dollars, to construct a library in New York’s East Village. Other libraries were founded in the years that followed. The Lenox was funded by the state in 1870. It would become an amazing archive, including in its collections a fabled Gutenberg Bible. Finally in 1886 Samuel J. Tilden bequeathed the bulk of a nearly two and a half million dollar estate, roughly sixty four million dollars today, to “establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York”.
It took a lot of work and more money, but, finally, on this day in 1911 that the New York Public Library was dedicated.
New York Public is the second largest library in the United States, after only the Library of Congress, and the fourth largest library in the world.
A wonder to behold. A gift to the world.
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