The New York Public Library celebration of the life of Brooke Russell Astor last night focused on her passion for reading and writing and her ability to communicate the importance of the library to other New Yorkers.

“We are here to celebrate Brooke Astor’s exceptional life and raise a glass of champagne to her,” the chairwoman of the library, Catherine Marron, said.

Astor, who died August 13 at the age of 105, became a trustee of the library in 1959 and made headlines when she declared she was resigning from all her other boards to focus on the library. She is credited with helping the library out of financial crisis in the 1970s and into its current era of stability and recognition as a world-class institution; through the Vincent Astor Foundation, she directed $25 million to the library and inspired other major gifts. The library is a beneficiary of her estate.

“She lifted this noble library to a new level of brilliance,” the president of the library, Paul LeClerc, said.

The formal program, which lasted just over an hour, included Nobel Literature Laureate Toni Morrison reading Astor’s childhood poems, New York Post columnist Liz Smith remembering a visit to Astor in Maine, and the editor of the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers, reading book reviews she wrote for Vogue in the 1920s (she panned Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis’s 1927 novel “Elmer Gantry”).

The president of the Carnegie Corporation, Vartan Gregorian, who served as president of the library from 1981 to 1989, said, “Not a single sector in New York has not been touched by the extraordinary generosity of Brooke Astor, but it is not the money alone. It was her spirit and her genuine and deep affection for the causes she championed.”

Mr. Gregorian drew laughter when he told of the dinner Astor organized for him when he became president. “It was kind of a debutante party,” he said.

“The guest list was virtually the same as that of the one she’d given for a dinner for Reagan. I was astonished. When I asked why this was, she said, ‘It’s simple: The president of the library is an important citizen of New York and the nation, and the library is one of New York and America’s most significant institutions.’ Then I asked her why there were no trustees of the library on the guest list. She said, ‘You’ll see them all the time.’ “

Afterward, the approximately 300 guests adjourned to a reception in Astor Hall. Many former employees of the library who knew Astor were present.

“If she were here, she’d be talking to the guards, not the other trustees,” a retired development officer of the library, Trudy Hayden, said.

A former librarian at the Aguilar branch in Harlem, Mary Anne Corrier, remembered Astor talking to a patron about diet books before going up a long flight of stairs to listen to a children’s group read a poem.

The library created a commemorative book for the occasion, full of quotations from her own writings, photographs of her at the library, a bibliography of her published writings, and a list of facilities and activities named after Astor and the Astor family.

Attendees included Barbara Walters, Oscar and Annette de la Renta, Gordon Davis, Lewis and Dorothy Cullman, and Randall Bourscheidt; past chairmen of the library who attended were Samuel Butler, Marshall Rose, and Elizabeth Rohatyn.

In a segment from “The Charlie Rose Show” played as part of the program, Mr. Rose asked Astor, “You had an opportunity to change people’s lives?”

She replied, “Well, no. Not much. I don’t believe in praise. It’s one thing I don’t believe in.”