SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK COUNTY OF NEW YORK

CITIZENS DEFENDING LIBRARIES, : EDMUND MORRIS, ANNALYN SWAN, : STANLEY N. KATZ, THOMAS BENDER,: DAVID NASAW, JOAN W. SCOTT, CYNTHIA M. PYLE, CHRISTABEL GOUGH, and BLANCHE WEISSEN COOK, Plaintiffs, - against - 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 AND RECREATION, CITY OF NEW YORK, ROBERT SILMAN ASSOCIATES,: P.C., and JOSEPH TORTORELLA, Defendants. -andSTATE OF NEW YORK, NEW YORK STATE OFFICE OF PARKS, RECREATION & HISTORIC PRESERVATION (NEW YORK STATE HISTORIC PRESERVATION OFFICE), Nominal Defendants. : x

Index No.: 652427/2013

AFFIDAVIT OF ANNALYN SWAN

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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 researchsome 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 diariesJohnRothenstein's Time's Thievish Progress, for examplewhich 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 beganfor 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 allThe 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 lagan 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 booksand, 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 placespecifically, 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 palacea 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 a second thought: it never came close to rivaling the importance of the Rose Reading Room.
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13.

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

the New York Public Librarythat of fostering great thinking and researchremains 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 this gth_ day of July, 2013.

CHERYL MEADOWS Notary Public, State of New York Quailed In New York County No, 0110E0225568 My Commission Expires 07-26-2014