NEWARK — In Philip Roth’s novella “Goodbye, Columbus,” the Newark Public Library is where Neil Klugman spends a summer working with a colleague whose “breath smells of hair oil and hair oil of breath” and mooning over the rich and sexy Brenda Patimkin. In real life, Mr. Roth has designated the library, which he has called his home away from home, as the repository for his own book collection, a bequest that will be announced here on Thursday evening at the inaugural Philip Roth Lecture, to be delivered by Zadie Smith.

The series is a sort of thank-you on the part of the library’s trustees, who see the gift of his books as a fortunate, transforming windfall and intend to house it in a special room designed by the architect Henry Myerberg. “It really sparked a renaissance here at the library,” Rosemary Steinbaum, a trustee, said recently, explaining that the board planned to start a capital campaign not just to pay for the Roth room but also to refurbish the whole place. “We think the Newark Public Library can now become an important literary destination for students and scholars and even for tourists.”

Mr. Roth’s library, some 4,000 volumes, is now stored mostly at his house in northwest Connecticut, where it has more or less taken over the premises. A room at the back of the house has been given over to nonfiction. It has library shelves, library lighting — everything except a librarian, Mr. Roth said recently on the phone from his New York apartment. Fiction starts in the living room, takes up all the walls in a front study, and has also colonized a guest bedroom upstairs. Copies of Mr. Roth’s own books and their many translations are stuffed in closets and piled in the attic. The books that were helpful to Mr. Roth in his research for his novel “The Plot Against America” are all grouped together, as are those he consulted for “Operation Shylock.”