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Books are for everyone at this outdoor reading room

The first thing you need to know about the Bryant Park Reading Room is that it isn’t a room. Located behind the New York Public Library in Manhattan, this open-air Reading Room sits under a leafy canopy of plane trees at the 42nd Street entrance to Bryant Park. Green metal carts hold books and periodicals for children and adults, and anyone may sit and read—no library card needed!

“‘I’m in a muddle about a lot of things—I’ve just discovered that I’ve a mind, and I’m starting to read.’

‘Read what?’

‘Everything. I have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things that make me think.’”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

First established in August 1935, the Reading Room was a public response to the high unemployment rates brought on by the Great Depression. The reading room (really a row of park benches and some carts full of books, staffed by five librarians employed by the Works Progress Administration) served as a place where unemployed businessmen and intellectuals were welcome during the day, with no need for money, a home address, a library card, or any identification at all. Anyone could visit the Reading Room to enjoy the reading materials, and by its second summer it had attracted 64,624 patrons. The first iteration of the Reading Room was open every summer until 1944, when the program was stopped because many of the unemployed patrons had joined the war effort and re-entered the work force.

The Reading Room reopened in 2003 with expanded offerings including children’s books and literary programming, notably the “Word for Word” Book Club series, which Oxford University Press has been helping to organize since 2008.

“Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Reading Moby Dick in the park.
Reading Moby Dick in the park.

At each Book Club, an acclaimed contemporary author leads a discussion on a book in the Oxford World’s Classics series that has a connection to the author’s own work. This year, for example, the following events are happening every second Tuesday from now until August (Oh, “that it would always be summer  . . . !”  —Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy):

Tuesday, June 28, 2016, 12:30 p.m.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Facilitated by Journalist, Magazine Editor Mark Beauregard, The Whale: A Love Story

Novel on the role Nathaniel Hawthorne played – both on and off paper – in influencing Melville’s Moby Dick.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016, 12:30 p.m.

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Facilitated by Award Winning Journalist, Reporter, Cultural Historian Lesley Blume, Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises

A look behind the personalities of those who helped inspire the classic that changed the literary world forever.

Tuesday, July 26 , 2016, 12:30 p.m.

About Love and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov

Facilitated by Fiction Editor, The New Yorker Deborah Treisman

A discussion on the craft of short stories and the influence Chekhov has had over the art of story-writing.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016, 12:30 p.m.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Facilitated by Award-Winning Poet Judith Baumel, The Kangaroo Girl

Author’s third book of poetry.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016, 12:30 p.m.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Facilitated by Journalist, Correspondent, Photographer Jillian Keenan, Sex With Shakespeare: Here’s Much to do With Pain but More With Love (A Memoir)

An author’s personally-felt connection to Shakespeare, love, and obsession.

Whether you can make it to some of these Book Clubs in person or not, keep an eye on the OUP blog for photos, videos, and excerpts from the classics featured in the series. If you’ve ever felt, like Anton Chekhov, that “All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensively complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still,” the great works of literature featured in the series just might have some answers for you.

Images are all by Lucie Taylor and Emily Tobin and used with permission.

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