This month the New York Public Library celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Library Lions, which honors remarkable cultural figures in the fields of literature, art, the performing arts, history, and science. Past Lions have included Maurice Sendak, Philip Roth, Renee Fleming, James D. Watson, and Oprah Winfrey, and this year's luminaries are Martin Scorsese, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tom Stoppard, and John Hope Franklin. Aside from raising money to benefit the library's many worthy programs, president Paul LeClerc seeks "to establish how essential libraries are to civilization, to the cultural, artistic, and intellectual life of the nation." Imagine a world without the works of Mike Nichols or George C. Wolfe, both of whom courted the muse in the performing arts library at Lincoln Center, or Robert Caro, who wrote The Power Broker in the bosom of the main library, or Martin Scorsese, who relied on library research to realize Gangs of New York and might never have become a director had it not been for a book of film stills he discovered as a boy in the Tompkins Square Library. "That book," the director has said, "cast a spell on me." As these honorees can attest, libraries are where ideas are born, where people are inspired to make art and, later, history.