Visit a used book store and, after about an hour, all the old books will start looking pretty much the same—the pages get yellowed, the edges become ragged, and the binding starts to disintegrate. What you end up with is shelf after shelf of cheap, trashy, tatters, but that's not so with the New York Public Library's collection of its old books. We went back to the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Bryant Park last week to get a closer look at Rare Books Division, a 280,000 volume-strong collection filled with striking, unique works dating back hundreds of years into history, including everything from the first book published in North America to the book in which Ernest Hemingway jotted down his Nobel acceptance speech. more ›