Metro

It’s stacking up as grrreat book battle

MANE EVENT: A lawsuit seeks to prevent the New York Public Library from moving 1.5 million research books out of its main branch to Jersey. (
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Now it’s a fight.

The scholars-vs.-bookworms battle over the future of the main branch of the New York Public Library has already raged for more than a year in high-toned op-eds and essays, and now it’s spilling over into the courts.

A group of academics and preservationists has filed a lawsuit to stop the removal of 3 million noncirculating research books from the seven floors of structural steel shelves lovingly known as “the stacks.”

For a century, the stacks have resided in arcane and musty repose under the building’s Rose Main Reading Room. Scholars could request and peruse the stacks’ invaluable tomes, just not leave the premises with them.

But a $300 million renovation plan for the Beaux Arts Fifth Avenue building will transform it into a wider-use circulating library and, in the process, destroy the stacks and consign half of its books to storage facilities under adjacent Bryant Park — and the other half to Princeton, NJ.

This is what has the academicians’ requisition forms in a twist.

“It is probable that it would take more than one to two business days for books to arrive,” the suit says of those 1.5 million books consigned to Jersey.

“It is also probable that some requested books will not be sent at all,” the suit despairs.

The delays will “severely and irreparably burden the ability . . . to receive information,” it adds.

The lawsuit, filed this week in Manhattan Supreme Court, demands a court injunction to halt any demolition of the stacks before it begins, as scheduled, later this year.

The lawsuit also demands that the NYPL halt its plans to sell off two additional major buildings — the Mid-Manhattan Library across the street, and the Science, Industry and Business Library on Madison Avenue off 34th Street.

It is those two buildings’ circulating books that would be moved into the main branch under the library’s renovation plan.

The Rose Reading Room and the stacks themselves have already been under consideration for a year to be designated internal landmarks by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Destruction of the stacks — which were built of sturdy Carnegie steel in 1911 along with the rest of the library structure, which they help support — would make a pending public hearing on the matter moot, the suit argues.

“We think the renovation offers a great opportunity to improve libraries for all New Yorkers,” NYPL spokesman Ken Weine said in response to a request for comment.

“We have not yet reviewed the complaint.”

The dispute over the stacks has been flaring in such publications as The Nation, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere.

The lawsuit is being brought by five ardent users and supporters of the stacks: New York University history professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Levering Lewis; his wife, library- sciences scholar Ruth Ann Stewart; architecture historian Mark Alan Hewitt; historian Jacob Morris; and editor and publisher Jack MaCrae.