The main branch of the New York Public Library, is located in midtown Manhattan — and it’s enormous. The building runs from 40th Street to 42nd across 5th Avenue, stretching about a third of the way toward Sixth. It contains an estimated 2.5 million volumes of books in its stacks with millions more in storage just a few feet away.
Those stored books are in Bryant Park, a nearly ten-acre public space behind the library. Beneath the park are the Milstein Research Stacks, which hold approximately four million more volumes of books across a combined length of roughly 80 miles of bookshelves. The Research Stacks, originally built in the 1980s, are virtually unknown to the thousands and thousands of people who visit Bryant Park each year; as the New York Times reported, the stacks are “17 feet below ground, in a concrete bunker worthy of the White House.” You don’t find them by accident.
And you don’t have to visit, either. If you want a book from the Stacks, you don’t have to go into the catacombs. The books will come to you. They’ll take a train.
In October of 2016, the library began using a monorail-like book delivery system. Librarians from the main building could summon a book from the underground stacks by tapping the request into a computer system; that message would go to workers in the Stacks who, in turn, would place the books into one of two-dozen custom train cars. To get from beneath Bryant Park and into the main branch, the books travel along 950 feet of tracks which, at times, run vertically — the little cars are designed so that the greyish bucket carrying the payload always remains upright while the red, lion-adorned base pivots to meet the track’s direction.
