Posts by Meredith Mann

In this episode, NYPL's Tal Nadan spoke about the Horn & Hardart Automat with Lisa Hurwitz, director of the documentary film The Automat, and Alec Shuldiner, author of a 2001 dissertation on these once ubiquitous coin-operated eateries in New York and Philadelphia.

In this episode, author Debby Applegate discusses her new book about how Adler, a young Jewish immigrant, became the proprietress of one of Manhattan's most notorious bordellos in the era of Prohibition enforcers and the New York City vice sqad.

In this episode, NYPL's Melanie Locay and Amy Sohn, New York Times bestselling author of The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship & Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age, discussed Sohn's research into a critical moment in the history of anti-censorship and reproductive rights activism in America. In 1873, the Comstock law passed, penalizing the mailing of contraception and obscenity with harsh sentences and steep fines.  Anthony Comstock, special agent to the Post Office and the law's namesake, viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family. Between 1873 and the 

In this episode, Bogdan Horbal, Curator of the NYPL's Slavic and East European Collections, and Yasha Klots, Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at Hunter College, CUNY, discussed tamizdat, the contraband Russian literature published outside of the Soviet Union.

In this episode, NYPL's Lyudmila Sholokhova was joined by Jonathan Schorsch of the University of Potsdam. They discussed Schorsch's new publication, 'The Remarkable Life of Luis Moses Gomez', which explores one of New York's most prominent Sephardic Jewish merchant families from the 18th century.

In this episode, NYPL’s Elizabeth Cronin and art historian Katherine Manthorne discuss Manthorne's new book, 'Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex', which tells the story of the most famous woman American artist you’ve probably never heard of.

In this episode, we were joined by Barbara Heller and Anna Pinto who worked on a new edition of 'Pride and Prejudice' filled with reproductions of the book's Regency-era correspondence.

In this episode, NYPL's Joshua Chuang and renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers, author of the recently published Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch, will discuss how the great American artist came to develop his eye, as well as the influential encounters Evans had as a young artist at the NYPL.

In its inaugural episode, NYPL's Meredith Mann and Alicia Cheng, author of 'This Is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot', discussed American ballots' evolving graphic design and what they can tell us about the history of voting and elections.

Our in-person visits are on hiatus, but we are still available to help you with virtual consultations and advice.

This book digs fearlessly into the complex environmental and human rights issues of the world’s ungoverned and ungovernable high seas.

A sampling of publications whose authors relied upon the Library’s archival and rare book collections in their research.

To celebrate Herman Melville's 200th birthday, the Library is displaying notable Melville items from our collections, including family correspondence and literary manuscripts.

One of our finalists for this year's Helen Bernstein Award, "Dopesick" presents a searing investigation of America's opioid crisis, as author Beth Macy confronts a pervasive, systemic challenge to American drug treatment.

Much attention has been paid lately to the MTA during what has been termed the “Summer of Hell.” Instead of simply bemoaning the current state of affairs, we can look to a citizen’s group that has been actively working toward improving the City transit system for almost forty years.

The celebration of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism prompted an exploration of our collections to celebrate the work and achievements of the Fourth Estate.

In January 2017, thousands gathered on Fifth Avenue and the surrounding area for the Women’s March. But this wasn’t the first time that this street was the home for a massive demonstration: almost fifty years ago, it was a primary thoroughfare for the first Earth Day celebration.

Ever since its launch in 1925, the New Yorker has been a fixture of newsstands, coffee tables, and commuter bags. The New York Public Library recently acquired the New Yorker Digital Archive, a database that provides access to every issue of the New Yorker, often including new issues days before their print release. Now you can read the New Yorker from home, school, or anywhere else in the world with an internet connection and your library card.

Every year since 1988, the New York Public Library has awarded the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. This year we will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the award.