NOWHERE IS EVERWHERE : Utopia at the New York Public Library.

Were Sir Thomas More (1478- 1535) to wander into the New York Public Library exhibit, "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World," he would no doubt be astonished at what he hath wrought. More's "splendid little book, no less instructive than entertaining," as the description on the title page reads, not only bequeathed the term "utopia" to future generations, but also initiated a flourishing literary genre populated by the likes of Jonathan Swift and Ray Bradbury, and influenced historical events and political movements all the way from the American Revolution to Marxism to 1950s urban planning to the Internet. Or so the library would have it in its exhaustive, cerebral new exhibit, on view through January 27, 2001.

A collaboration with the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (where a similar version was on view this summer), this show boasts hundreds of books, manuscripts, etchings, architectural renderings, posters, maps, photographs, and album covers. It is rich fare, not quickly or easily digested. A warning: Do not attempt this in your lunch hour.

The exhibit states its intentions in its entrance tableau: two early printed versions of Ovid's Metamorphoses, open to the description of the Golden Age, stand against a backdrop of modern Plexiglas stairway bookshelves containing contemporary paperback versions of utopian works published between 1516 and the present. Actually, seven hundred years of Western history are under consideration here, and the exhibit stretches the definition of "utopia" so much that the visitor may be forgiven for wondering where the limits fall in an exhibit that includes a manuscript of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, a first edition of Robinson Crusoe (is a solitary utopia possible?), and record album covers from the 1960s. The show is a great advertisement for the library's magnificent collections, but as a clearly defined treatment of the search for utopia, it comes up a bit short, or more accurately, a bit long. The advantage of this approach is that there is probably something here for just about everyone.

Though More gets credit for entering the term into the lexicon of Western cultural history, the seeds of utopia existed in ancient and biblical sources, where the perfect world was known variously as the Golden Age, the New Jerusalem, the Land of Cockaigne, and, of course, the Garden of Eden. Illustrations of these constitute the first section of the exhibition, and there are many treasures here. I particularly liked the scene depicted in a fifteenth-century Franco-Flemish Book of Hours showing the expulsion from the Garden. A stooping, dispirited Adam and a wistful Eve walk slowly through a lush garden with gravid fruit trees and a profusion of animals, as a flaming red cherub, his sword raised, glowers against a possible return. Exquisite in color and detail, it conveys the poignancy of paradise lost.

If paradise had been lost, then surely it could be found, and medieval Christian writers developed the narrative of the quest for the perfect world to a high art. A delightful example of this literary form occurs in the Navigatio of Saint Brendan. A sixth-century Irish monk, Brendan made a seven-year sea voyage around the isles of Ireland in search of paradise. His travels were circular, he and his companions returning each year to celebrate the Easter vigil on the back of an enormous fish, Jasconius. The fanciful depiction of this celebration (in a seventeenth-century manuscript recounting the quest) features a fish with human eyes bearing an altar and several monks on its scaly back.

Thomas More gave these various traditions a local habitation and a name in his 1516 volume describing the island of Utopia, a society that lay "beyond the equator" and was characterized by justice, rational conduct, and economic equality. On view are various first editions of Utopia (the original in Latin, as well as later English and French versions). One is struck by the impact that such a slim volume, in quarto, has had on the world. Among the items flanking these printed texts are eighteenth-century etchings which give amusing incarnation to More's social pragmatism. For example, when More's Utopians sought a mate, they arranged for the prospective bride and groom to evaluate each other unclothed--professing surprise at how careless the rest of the world is about entering such an undertaking sight unseen. The etching "How engagements are made in Utopia," shows a bare and buxom female, draped discreetly where it mattered, and a similarly unclad and solidly fleshed male, coolly sizing each other up. It is as practical a mating dance as can be imagined.

The publication of Utopia coincided with an unprecedented wave of geographic exploration. Europeans viewed the New World as a tabula rasa on which they could project their own images of a perfect society. A plenitude of maps and engravings documents these commonly distorted perspectives and traces the development of a more accurate understanding of the newfound lands. A 1540 map drawn by the great cartographer Sebastian Munster illustrates both tendencies: while it is one of the earliest maps to show the Americas as a separate continent, it also indicates the presence of cannibals in South America by depicting a human leg roasting on a bonfire.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, utopia began to leave the realm of the abstract for everyday life, by way of political revolutions (the American and the French) and social movements. The section of the exhibit which details some of these events is the area of greatest exchange with the Bibliotheque Nationale, and seems accordingly to be skewed toward things French--although clearly France was the locus of much utopian activity during this time. With the utopian socialist movements of early nineteenth-century France, for example, reformers such as Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon sought a new way of life based on the abolition of private property and the creation of self-contained communities. An interesting piece here is the vest worn by Barthelemy Enfantin, a prominent Saint-Simonian. A typical item of clothing for the members of the community, this particular one is white (signifying love) and red (signifying work). It buttons up in the back, emphasizing fraternity and mutual dependence, and has the member's name emblazoned across the front--in this case, Enfantin's title, le p`ere--to represent individual responsibility.

By this point, the library's Gottesman Hall is bursting at the seams and the exhibit moves up two floors to the Edna Barnes Salomon Room for a look at the twentieth century. It is the largest segment of the show and one in which the broad definition of utopia feels most strained. At the same time, some truly remarkable materials illuminate the disastrous consequences of more recent attempts to engineer perfection. It becomes painfully clear that the limits of utopia are the limits of human nature, and that any attempts to construct a world governed on rational principles--or any other monolithic theory--will run up against greed, self-interest, and power.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in two of the most ill-fated political experiments of the twentieth century, Nazism and Soviet Communism. One side of an exhibition case displays various Nazi propaganda tools. There is, for example, a cigarette-card album (similar to a baseball-card album) in which Germans could paste pictures of smiling blond children and stalwart mothers, representations of ideal families in Hitler's perfect Aryan society. And on the other side of the case are photographs and etchings of actual Nazi atrocities in Poland, showing tortured bodies, hanging bodies, bodies in agony.

Soviet propaganda and its dark underside are on parade, too. An entire wall features black-and-white photographs from Stalin's glossy magazine, USSR in Construction, published in several languages (including English) from 1930 to 1941. Designed to proclaim Russia's entrance onto the world stage as a major industrial power, the magazine features photographs of workers discovering the "poetry of labor," the "romance of construction work." There is a photograph of an avuncular Stalin hugging a female worker at an Armenian textile mill. The brightly colored Soviet propaganda posters show heroically proportioned women and muscle-bound men busily engaged in acts of productivity for the state. My favorite, titled "May 1, 1920," has a family striding purposefully, scythes and axes in hand, flags waving, chests thrust forward. Juxtaposed with these images are films and photographs of Soviet labor camps.

The American visitor may leave the exhibit--particularly in this curious election year--pondering what has become of the search for utopia. Of course perfection is unattainable (a fact More acknowledged in titling his work, which, through a pun on its Greek roots, means both "good place" and "no place"), but merely to engage in the quest seems something of a moral choice. Wrapped in the heavy mantle of materialism, captivated by the illusion of personal autonomy, do we even bother any longer to dream of a perfect society? The exhibit considers the possibility of a "cybertopia" in a Web site called Metaworlds. But there is a clue elsewhere, in one of the single most riveting items in the exhibit.

As you round a corner in Gottesman, you see them: two tall Plexiglas tubes, the documents inside seemingly suspended in midair. A light goes on, illuminating the strong, clear handwriting of Thomas Jefferson. It is a fair copy of the Declaration of Independence, one of three surviving copies penned by the optimistic visionary himself. No matter how many times you have seen it in a textbook, to view the document itself is profoundly moving, emblematic of the best the exhibit has to offer.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." While these words have not brought about utopia, they do serve as a salutary reminder of principle to those who carry the quest for utopia forward into the twenty-first century.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill is co-author, with Joseph Papp, of Shakespeare Alive! (Bantam).