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Most of the stone columns seen here over the past few days have been composed of round sections called drums which are stacked on top of each other to form the shaft. These are monolithic, carved from a single piece of marble.

Henry Hope Reed, perhaps our country's foremost champion of the ideals of classical architecture, calls the Library an encyclopedia of Classical design, and his The New York Public Library: Its Architecture and Decoration contains all the articles and labeled diagrams you'd need to be able to treat it as such when you visit.

The Rube may have said this before, but that's something he loves about New York: whatever you read about and get interested in, you can go somewhere here to see the real thing. It's a lot better than just having the book.