The Harry Scherman Library was the main library facility of the Mannes College of Music for 51 years (1965–2016). In 1964, the Clara Damrosch Mannes Memorial Library, the facility at Mannes College’s location at 157 East 74th Street in New York City, was expanded and modernized. The following year, the library was renamed in honor of Harry Scherman, a trustee of the college since 1941. The library contained the college’s reference books, circulating collection of scores, and audio recordings.

In 1984, the Mannes College of Music was relocated from East 74th Street to a building at 150 West 85th Street, and the Harry Scherman Library was re-established there. In 1989, Mannes became a division of the New School for Social Research, and through the Research Library Association of Southern Manhattan, Mannes students gained access to the music resource holdings of the Bobst Library at New York University, in addition to the Scherman Library’s holdings.

In 2016, Mannes School of Music was relocated to The New School's Arnhold Hall, at 55 West 13th Street, near to other New School buildings, and became part of the newly consolidated College of the Performing Arts, which included Mannes, the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, and the Drama Program of The New School. At this time, the resources of the Harry Scherman Library became part of the combined holdings of the Performing Arts. By 2017 the new library facility became known as the Performing Arts Library, at which time the Harry Scherman Library as a separate entity ceased to exist.

References

Course Catalogs. “Mannes College of Music.” College of Performing Arts Course Catalog Collection. 1916-2006. The New School Archives Digital Collections, New York, New York.

“The Face of Mannes.” Notes from Mannes 7, no. 1 (November 1972): 5.

“Harry Scherman, Book-of-Month Club Founder.” The Jewish Exponent 21 (Nov 1969): 73.

Radway, Janice A. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Scherman, Harry (Interviewee). "Reminiscences of Harry Scherman, 1955". 1955. Book-of-the-Month Club project, Oral History Archives at Columbia, Columbia University. Columbia Digital Library Collections. Accessed Thu Oct 17 2024. https://doi.org/10.7916/nbs9-qj81.

Harry Scherman (born February 1, 1887, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; died November 12, 1969, New York, New York) was a Canadian-born American book publisher and economics writer. Scherman came to the United States from Canada at the age of two with his mother and was raised in Philadelphia. After attending Central High School, where he acquired an interest in classical literature, Scherman received a scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in 1905. He soon dropped out of the Wharton School and re-enrolled into the University of Pennsylvania’s school of law, only to leave school entirely soon thereafter to take on a job in New york City as a culture and society reporter for the American Hebrew weekly newspaper.

By 1912, Scherman had moved into a series of advertising copywriting jobs, while attempting to establish a career writing plays and short stories. While finding no publishers interested in his works of fiction, Scherman discovered an aptitude for mail-order sales copywriting, eventually attaining a position at the J. Walter Thompson agency in 1914. In 1916, with a plan to combine his marketing talents with his literary interests, Scherman co-founded the Little Leather Library Company, which sold various small, leather-bound public-domain literary classics by mail.

Recognizing the limitations of selling a fixed set of known titles, Scherman devised a subscription-based business model which would market new titles selected by an appointed committee of experts. In 1926, Scherman and Little Leather Library partner, Max Sackheim, co-founded the Book-of-the-Month Club, adopting the Little Leather Library's business model as its foundation. Scherman became president of the company in 1931, and chairman in 1950. By the time of Scherman’s death in 1969, the Book-of-the-Month Club had sold 250 million books to its subscribers internationally.

In addition to serving on the Mannes School of Music board, Scherman was on the board of MacDowell music colony and a director-at-large of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was a published author in the field of economics, and his book, The Promises Men Live By: A New Approach to Economics was a best-seller when it appeared in 1937. Scherman’s son, Thomas Scherman (1917-1979) received an artist diploma from Mannes in 1940, and later founded and conducted the Little Orchestra Society of New York.

References

Course Catalogs. “Mannes College of Music.” College of Performing Arts Course Catalog Collection. 1916-2006. The New School Archives Digital Collections, New York, New York.

“The Face of Mannes.” Notes from Mannes 7, no. 1 (November 1972): 5.

“Harry Scherman, Book-of-Month Club Founder.” The Jewish Exponent 21 (Nov 1969): 73.

Radway, Janice A. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Scherman, Harry (Interviewee). "Reminiscences of Harry Scherman, 1955". 1955. Book-of-the-Month Club project, Oral History Archives at Columbia, Columbia University. Columbia Digital Library Collections. Accessed Thu Oct 17 2024. https://doi.org/10.7916/nbs9-qj81.