While celebrating the occasion of becoming a Library Lion at the New York Public Library on Monday, Nobel laureate James Watson shared some of his rules for success.

“Work on Sunday,” Mr. Watson said. “Never be the brightest person in the room. And avoid gatherings of more than two Nobel laureates.”

As it happened, Mr. Watson was in the company of at least five other Nobel laureates: three of his fellow honorees, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, and Chinese writer Gao Xingjian, as well as Toni Morrison and Henry Kissinger. But he was not in violation of his rule.

“Tonight’s different. There are a lot of interesting people in the room,” Mr. Watson said. “It’s only when you’re just with Nobel Prize winners. That’s boring.”

This event was not boring for many reasons, and chief among them was that it celebrated an extraordinary institution.

“The library is genuine, tangible, inexhaustible, and begs to be explored and reveled in,” the chairwoman of the library, Catherine Marron, said.

Ms. Morrison called the library, “The best of what civilization has to offer.”

The event itself gave guests a sense of transformation, a physical, sensual one, through the conversion of the library’s reading room into New York’s most beautiful and high-powered dining room.

It was the first time the gala was held in the Deborah, Jonathan F.P., Samuel Priest, and Adam R. Rose Main Reading Room, named after the children of Sandra Priest Rose and the late Frederick Rose, who restored the room with a $15 million gift in 1998.

“This is not the first time I’ve been here,” Mr. Pamuk said. “I’ve slept here, I know what bathroom is the cleanest in the building. I admire the silence here, the whisper of the turning pages. So it’s a surprise for me, almost a scandal, that I’m eating dinner here. I’m amazed how they changed the reading room into a restaurant.”

The change, planned by event designer David Monn and library trustee Gayfryd Steinberg, began Friday night and involved 60 engineers, carpenters, and riggers. Some of their tasks included laying down 10,500 square feet of chocolate brown carpeting; installing, with the tallest lift made, magnolia and pine wreaths 12 feet in diameter in the brass chandeliers; replacing the 93 brass shades on the reading tables with silk olive green ones and dying the fringe on the linen napkins to match the shades, and setting dinner settings for 600 guests at the 66 reading tables. Every detail was considered, down to the food on the plate. The meal — meatloaf with Brussels sprouts and ginger carrot puree, catered by Glorious Food — matched the brown, green, and orange color scheme of the décor.

The effect was splendid — most of all for the people who remembered the room in its rundown, shabby days, when the windows were painted black, the tables were marred, and the paintings on the ceilings were too dirty to appreciate.

“It’s very child-like, Harry Potter-esque. It’s about the imagination taking off,” the executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Joseph Melillo, said.

“It’s the most spectacular and wonderful dinner we’ve ever had here,” the president of the library, Paul LeClerc, said.

“It’s a privilege to be here. I’m sitting next to Elie Wiesel,” one of the co-chairwomen, Christine Schwarzman said. “It’s so humbling. I’m lucky to go home and find time to read a book!”

The décor enhanced the natural beauty of the room. The room’s chief benefactor, Mrs. Rose, was in a protective mood. “I’m here because I want to make sure no one spills anything on the tables,” she said.

By yesterday morning, all the decoration had been removed. The scholars were back at their tables, turning pages, lost in thought. And the library had raised $2.2 million for its general book fund — $400,000 more than last year’s event.

Fran Lebowitz said the room was a fine spot for a dinner party, but had an even better idea for its use. “I see this as Fran’s home. It’s the only room in New York big enough to fit all my books,” she said.

Mayor Bloomberg told guests of another library he had visited recently, in Little Rock, Ark., “When the spouse of your senator calls up, you really have to go, particularly if the guy could be the next first lady,” Mayor Bloomberg said about President Clinton.

agordon@nysun.com