SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORKCOUNTY OF NEW YORK xCITIZENS DEFENDING LIBRARIES, :EDMUND MORRIS, ANNALYN SWAN, :STANLEY N. KATZ, THOMAS BENDER,:DAVID NASAW, JOAN W. SCOTT, •CYNTHIA M. PYLE, CHRISTABELGOUGH, and BLANCHE WEISSENCOOK,

Plaintiffs,

Index No.: 652427/2013

- against - AFFIDAVIT OFANNALYN SWAN

DR. ANTHONY W. MARX, NEIL L. :RUDENSTINE, BOARD OF TRUSTEES :OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, :NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, ASTOR, :LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS, :MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG,VERONICA WHITE, NEW YORK CITY :DEPARTMENT OF PARKS ANDRECREATION, CITY OF NEWYORK, ROBERT SILMAN ASSOCIATES,:P.C., and JOSEPH TORTORELLA,

Defendants.

-and-

STATE OF NEW YORK, NEW YORKSTATE OFFICE OF PARKS,RECREATION & HISTORICPRESERVATION (NEW YORKSTATE HISTORIC PRESERVATIONOFFICE),

Nominal Defendants. :x

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State of New York

County of New York

ANNALYN SWAN, having been duly sworn, deposes and says:

1. I am a plaintiff in this action. I submit this Affidavit in Support of the

Order to Show Cause to enjoin demolition and removal of the underground stacks

("Stacks") located at the central branch of New York Public Library fronting Fifth

Avenue at 42nd Street ("Central Library").

My Background

2. . . I am a long-time editor, writer and biographer, and the author, with the

'Writer and art critic Mark Stevens, of de Kooning: An American Master, the 2005

Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the artist Willem de Kooning. The book also

won the National Book Critics Circle prize for biography and the Los Angeles Times

biography award, and was named one of the 10 best books of 2005 by The New York

Times. Mark and I have lectured extensively across the country about the book since

its publication. We are also currently at work on a biography of the 20th-century

British artist Francis Bacon, to be published in the United States by Knopf, in the

United Kingdom by Collins, and in Italy.

3. After graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree

from Princeton University in 1973, I attended King's College, Cambridge, on a

Marshall Scholarship and earned a Master's degree. Once I returned to the States, I

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was hired as a writer at Time, then joined Newsweek in 1980 as music critic. My

music criticism won an Ascap-Deems Taylor award and a Front Page Award. In

1983 I became the magazine's Senior Arts Editor. From 1986 to 1990, I served as

Editor-in-Chief of Savvy, a magazine for professional women. Since 1990 I have

divided my time between writing and editing. I have been a consulting editor at

Time Inc. and Gruner and Jahr, and, from 2003 to 2011, was a partner with Peter

Bernstein in ASAP Media, a firm that specialized in book, magazine and Internet

development, and that worked with The Boston Globe, Forbes, Newsweek and New

York Magazine, among others, on editorial projects.

4. In the past few years, I have begun teaching a course on "Life Writing:

The Art of Biography" at the university level. I was a visiting lecturer at Princeton

for the spring 2013 semester, and will be teaching in the Graduate Center at CUNY

for the spring term of 2014. Besides working on the Bacon biography, I also

continue to write occasional feature pieces on art and music.

My Use of the Central Branch

5. I first began to use the New York Public Library for research in the

summer of 1972, when I was a summer intern at the Wall Street Journal following

my junior year in college and was living for the first time in New York City. (I am

originally from Mississippi.) In my spare time, I began researching my senior thesis

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at Princeton on the influence of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and the esthetic

philosophy of the Omega Workshops on the novels of Virginia Woolf – "Stringing

the Pearls: Vision and Design in the novels of Virginia Woolf." This was before the

great boom in Virginia Woolf research, and material about her was much more

sparse. My memory is of spending many a happy afternoon submitting research

slips at the Central Branch and settling into books about the Bloomsbury culture.

To paraphrase my colleague Edmund Morris, the New York Public Library helped

make a scholar out of me.

6. Years later, when Mark Stevens and I were writing our biography of

Willem de Kooning, we did intensive original research—some 225 interviews, But

that was supplemented by research more generally on the cultural and social history

of New York City in the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s that I conducted at the Central

Library. Among many other things, our writing about the early Communist activism

of New York in the 1930s, as well as an overview of FDR's New Deal program for

artists and writers, came directly out of research that I conducted at the Central

Library.

7. If anything, the research that we have done on Francis Bacon has been

even more library-intensive, as fewer first-hand acquaintances are still alive, and we

are dealing with cultural developments abroad, with which we are less familiar.

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Mark was lucky enough to be named a Cullman Fellow at the library in 2007-2008

to work on our Bacon biography. As such, he was granted an office at the Cullman

Center for a year and could store books there, as well as make any number of

requests for research materials. In contrast, I have been one of those independent

research scholars who use the Rose Reading Room, or the adjacent art and

architecture room, to do research on their own. My use of the Rose Reading Room

has been very intensive over the past few years. Among other things, I have taken

notes from various art world diaries—JohnRothenstein's Time's Thievish Progress,

for example—which led me in turn to a number of books on Bacon influences,

among them Heather Johnson's Roy de Maistre: The English Years. I have

researched the world of interior design in which Bacon began—for example, three

biographies of Eileen Gray, an important Anglo-Irish designer who had a

well-known design shop in Paris and who influenced her younger Anglo-Irish

compatriot. And I spent weeks poring over books about the Anglo-Irish culture in

which he grew up. One book led to another until I finally found the most nuanced

source of all—The Anglo-Irish Tradition, by J.C. Beckett.

The Threatened Harm Posed by the Central Library Plan

8. By its nature, researching a book or scholarly article is a fluid affair.

One comes to the library to read through a number of books that seem promising

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from an initial search of the library's offerings online. In theory, it seems very

practical that one goes online to order books in advance, and then, once informed

that they have arrived, goes to the library to request them. In practice, however, the

system does not work this way. It is often virtually impossible to tell what the

content of any given book is really about until it is sitting in front of you. What

sounds perfect on paper, in short, often turns out to be anything but. For example,

not long ago I requested a book on gay culture related to Tangiers, where Francis

Bacon went for extended periods throughout the 1950s. But what arrived was not

what I expected, Instead, it was a sort of compendium of gay figures who had at

some point lived in Tangiers. It was only by going through the book's footnotes and

bibliography that I found references to books that were much more helpful to me.

9. And so I was faced with putting in new requests for those books that I

had found in the bibliography. According to the library's new system, those books

not stored in the Bryant Park annex will (supposedly) arrive in 24 hours.

So what is a researcher to do at this point? Return to the library in 24 hours (or, as

has more generally been the case, 48 to 72 hours later)? What are we supposed to

do in the interim? In the old days, virtually any book would arrive within a half hour

to 45 minutes. Now, if the initial requests do not pan out, there is nothing for it but to

put in a whole new batch of requests and then return in one, two or three days,

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depending on the time lag—an extremely inefficient process that significantly

interferes with research and writing. A quick check in the past few days of books

that I was interested in seeing showed about half available on-site, with the rest

off site and only available by request (and therefore subject to the one to three-day

delivery).

10. As unwieldy as this process is for us New Yorkers, imagine how

impossible this system is for researchers from other U.S. cities and from abroad,

who have come to New York to conduct research at our august institution. What do

they do while they wait for their second round of books—and, most probably, a

third, as one book leads to another? What do we tell researchers from abroad when

our revered library becomes cumbersome and unusable? In contrast, all but one

book that I ever requested at the British Library came from the nearby annex within

their delivery time of 75 minutes.)

11. Ever since it was built, the central New York Public Library has been

the de facto, and democratic, research institution for all New Yorkers, and in

particular for those who do not have access to the libraries of NYU and Columbia. It

has been, as well, a welcoming center for scholars from around the world. It is the

"People's Palace" in a way that is far more meaningful than the "People's Palace"

envisioned by President Tony Marx and company. To them, a "People's Palace" is

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all about cafes and computer clusters. Granted, those have their place—specifically,

in the 87 or so branch libraries of the New York Public Library. But the 42nd Street

Central Library was meant to be a different kind of palace—a great research library,

and one that is completely, and democratically, open to all New Yorkers (as well as

scholars from elsewhere). This was its purpose a hundred years ago. It was

conceived, designed, and always functioned as a great research library, rather than a

mixed-use facility. And so it has been until today. 1

12. But under the Central Library Plan, that balance would tilt irrevocably

away from research at the one great research institution in the system. The

demolition and removal of the Stacks, and the resulting displacement of the books

that were shelved there, would mark the destruction of the intricate, complex and

irreplaceable book delivery machine that was always at the very heart of the system.

The small circulating library that was housed there at one point was always asecond thought: it never came close to rivaling the importance of the Rose ReadingRoom.

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13. Even if times and technologies have changed, the central mission of

the New York Public Library—that of fostering great thinking and

research—remains intact. The Stacks so central to this miraculous book machine are

in peril. I respectfully request that the Court do everything in its power to protect

them.

Annvalyn Swan

SwK:n before me thisgth_ day of July, 2013.

CHERYL MEADOWSNotary Public, State of New York

Quailed In New York CountyNo, 0110E0225568

My Commission Expires 07-26-2014

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