The president of the New York Public Library, Paul LeClerc, made his expectations (somewhat) clear when he wooed Paul Holdengraber for the position of director of public programs.

“He said, ‘I want you to oxygenate the library.’ That word, oxygenate, really struck me,” Mr. Holdengraber emphasized in a multi-lingual accent acquired while growing up all over the world – it hints at German, French, Spanish.

Waving his hands, he declared, “The library doesn’t need oxygen.The job is to really invigorate it, to make it irresistible, to make it exciting, to make it alive.”

To accept the NYPL post, Mr. Holdengraber, 44, left Los Angeles, where he’d become something of a celebrity as the founder and director of the Institute for Arts and Culture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In a city derided for its superficiality, he was hailed as a cultural impresario. Naturally, the playing field changes quite a bit in New York.

This fall, Mr. Holdengraber is adding his panache to a program planned before he came on the scene. For the first event of the season on September 21, he has asked Maya Angelou to join scheduled guest Christopher Hitchens and discuss the work of Jessica Mitford.

“Many people don’t know that Maya Angelou and Jessica Mitford were friends,” he said. “My light touch here is that it will be a conversation with two people you wouldn’t think of together.”

He also added a program September 28 – a talk on terrorism by France’s minister of the interior, Dominique de Villepin. Mr. Holdengraber met Mr. de Villepin last year when he received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government.

The spring season, on the other hand, will be all Mr. Holdengraber. “It’s germinating,” he said, mentioning a few possible topics: ritual, obsessions, and language with negative connotations (he used the example of the word “elitism”).

“Lectures are dead,” he declared. “Bruno Bettelheim said, ‘Television captures the imagination but doesn’t free it’; the same thing happens with the lecture format: it’s someone talking at you. I’m much more interested in other ways of discourse.”

He aims to strike a balance between the library’s standard programming and “new things completely out of the ordinary.” To gather ideas, he’s assembling an informal board of advisors. He recently met with George Steel, with whom he shares a talent for integrating the traditional and avant-garde.

One change he’s sure of: There will be fewer events (the library has offered 60 to 80 events a year). “I want each event to be memorable,” he said. “These are my children. I care for each of them.” As in Los Angeles, he only invites people he has met. “I hardly ever speak to publicists or agents, I go straight to the source,” he said.

Mr. Holdengraber feels he’s arrived at an “incredible moment” for the library, citing five new hires over the past year. “This a really talented group of people, and we’re going to make things happen.”

He refuses to be reactive – slotting writers just because their books were recently published. “We are not Barnes & Noble,” he said.

Under Mr. Holdengraber’s direction, events become theater. He is “obsessed with the placement of chairs” because connecting the talent and the audience is so important.

For example, at an event in Los Angeles, jazz photographer William Claxton demonstrated his oft-repeated statement, “Photography is jazz for the eyes” by taking pictures of a jazz group performing on stage, which were nearly instantly projected onto a huge movie-sized screen.

“Then he and I spoke about the photographs. What we made is a spectacle.”

Mr. Holdengraber is often part of the show, distinguishing him from many of his peers, who remain behind the scenes.

“To some extent I’ve always been on stage. I’ve always delighted in the performative aspects of life. I use my hands all the time for emphasis.” He describes his role at events to “instigate, irritate.”

“I believe very, very deeply in the virtue of difficulty. I want people to be perplexed,” he added.

He also cultivates the atmosphere of a salon, cocktails and all “because when you go to an event, you experience something together. You should actually stay with the people. You should meet and you should talk.”

And he does not necessarily want Carrere and Hastings’s Beaux Arts architecture to be the main draw. “When I say I work at the New York Public Library, this is something that people hold very dear. They talk a lot about the building. I want them also to talk about other things,” he said.

He also plans to hold events outside the main library, working with the research libraries and the branches. He suggests a moveable feast. “It seems to me it’s about not only doing things at 42nd Street but also to make it an enchanted state throughout the city.”

Mr. Holdengraber was born in Houston and spent his childhood in Mexico, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and France.

His parents fled Vienna during World War II to escape the Nazis. His father, one year shy of finishing his medical degree, became a farmer in Haiti, and, later, a businessman.

When he was 14 he hitchhiked around Europe, alone. Before he entered university in Belgium, he toured 29 states in America.

Even as a young man, he made a point of mingling with the talent. “When I went to concerts, I always tried to meet the musicians – Ella Fitzgerald and Artur Rubenstein and Alexis Weissenberg and Herbert von Karajan. … Sometimes it lasted only three minutes but a lot can happen in those three minutes.”

Advice his father bestowed on him when he was 17 has defined his worldview: “He told me, ‘Don’t ever forget the word university comes from the world universe. Your interests must be far-reaching.'” Bibliomania was the focus of his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton (“I spent years with Walter Benjamin”) and it’s fitting that Mr. Holdengraber chose the Upper Upper West Side, home of Columbia University, as his home.

“New York is so exciting because everybody comes here. I want the library to be the place they want to come to,” Mr. Holdengraber said.