E have all heard about the small bookstores forced out of business - at least so they say - by that bookish Goliath, Barnes & Noble.

But whoever thought that bookstore giants would pose a threat to libraries? Yet that seems to be the case in at least one part of New York. At 81st and Amsterdam stands the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library, a shabby stone edifice where anyone, from a child to a homeless person, can borrow books - free. At 82nd Street and Broadway, just around the corner, is a spiffy Barnes & Noble, covering nearly a whole city block, where buying a few books could set you back a good hunk of your weekly paycheck.

Given the options - free library or capitalist bookstore - and the latte at Barnes & Noble notwithstanding, the superior choice seems obvious. But maybe not. Barnes & Noble appears to be thriving, while the library hobbles along. Besotted by consumerism, it seems that we don't feel that our objects of desire, even our objects of intellectual desire, are truly valuable unless we pay for them, and dearly.

But blaming the customer alone would be unfair. When it comes to marketing, Barnes & Noble is way ahead of public libraries, which our city fathers and mothers have all but written off as services to the poor and downtrodden and researchers, rather than seeing them as temples of knowledge for all.

Where Barnes & Noble is well-lighted and clean, the books invitingly displayed, most branch libraries are dim, cluttered and understocked. Just ask Don Bailey, a Texan who moved to the Upper West Side 11 years ago. Being a devoted reader, he immediately checked out his local library, the St. Agnes branch. It was, to put it mildly, a turnoff. "There's something about New York libraries," Mr. Bailey mused. "You don't have a good ambience."

The other day, Mr. Bailey, a flutist, natty in white slacks and blue checked shirt, sat in the well-appointed second-floor reading room of Barnes & Noble, obviously modeled after the venerable 42nd Street research library, sipping coffee and reading a hardcover copy of "Stupid White Men," No. 2 on The Times's nonfiction best-seller list. The week before he had sat in the same spot reading "George and Laura: Portrait of an American Marriage."

He likes the way Barnes & Noble puts all those hot-off-the-presses books in front, as tips on what to read. As for the two up-to-the-minute books about his fellow Texan, "You wouldn't find those at the library, would you?" he asked.

Good question, Mr. Bailey.

Around the corner at St. Agnes, Dori Saltzman, young, redheaded, infinitely patient, one of two resident librarians with master's degrees, braves a long line of patrons armed with such questions. At top efficiency, she taps "Stupid White Men" into the computer.

"Normally we have two copies, but they're both out. We have 175 copies in the system, and 46 holds. Every single copy is out. People have three weeks for each book, so I'm figuring you could probably get it in about a month."

Ditto for "George and Laura." How about "The Hours," stacked like hotcakes at Barnes & Noble? "Oh, that's a wait!" she exclaimed. Any book tied to a movie takes six months to get. "Right now, any book by Virginia Woolf is very hard to get. Prior to the movie, she was not as popular."

The precision with which Ms. Saltzman can report what is not available is impressive, and touching.

No wonder, if money has anything to do with it. Barnes & Noble at 82nd Street grossed an estimated $10.3 million last year, eight times the average budget for one of the city's 85 branch libraries. And those budgets are being cut by the city for the second year in a row.

While Barnes & Noble teaches children to abuse trendy books by dribbling their jelly sandwiches on them, St. Agnes offers unconditional love to the out of print, the unpopular, the best sellers of yesteryear. "How about Dickens?" Ms. Saltzman is asked. "David Copperfield" is out, but "A Tale of Two Cities" is in. Proust? In. Mark Twain? In. Jules Verne. In. Toni Morrison? In. Ralph Ellison. In.

Surely, even the poor and downtrodden deserve as much and more. Last year, St. Agnes logged 252,785 visits, like the one by the 9-year-old boy who sidled up to Ms. Saltzman last week and asked for anything on the N.B.A. After a series of no-hits, she found an N.B.A. All-Star Game video at another branch that the boy wanted. "Do you know your number?" she asked, meaning the bar code number on his library card.

Amazingly, he did. By heart.