A builder and biblioman, Seymour Durst has for the past three decades assembled the most comprehensive private collection İn existence devoted to New York City. "I don't collect books out of nostalgia," Durst clarifies, "but out of a love of information and history." Durst's drive to collect anything and everything on New York was kindly by a discovery he made in a Paris bookstore in the 1960s. "I saw a book on New York by a German photographer and thought "This must be a topic that interests a lot of people". Then and there I decided to develop a library devoted to New York starting with the books I had already acquired." Old York Library is the result: a center of information containing an amalgam of books, newspapers, magazines, journals, maps, blueprints, and a unique archive of New York memorabilia. ".There's nothing I have that the New York Public Library doesn't have," Durst confides, "but there's a difference; anything anyone would want to know about New York is centered here. It's in focus and easy to get at. 1t's all arranged by subject so you can go right to a section and find what you're looking for." Now numbering more than twelve thousand volumes, Durst's Old York Library has transformed his fıve-story home.

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