Posts from the Rare Books Division

In this episode NYPL's Bogdan Horbal and Samuel Casper of Hunter College delved into Dmitrii Moor's 1919 propaganda poster Sud narodnyi (The People's Court). They offered a close analysis of the evocative imagery in the print, which is a satirical procession depicting the various strata of late Imperial Russian society swept away by the Revolutions of 1917.

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.

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

Here are a dozen recent books whose authors relied on the Library's archival records as a vital resource, from the world of George Washington to the history of the Manhattan waterfront. Add these to your 2019 reading list!

Learn about the French castle with an entire library of "ghosts" and its connection to The New York Public Library's Spencer Collection.

With approximately 45,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present, The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world. In anticipation of 2018, we combed through the archives to find some of the most festive menus fêteing the new years of yore!

Recently, The New York Public Library digitized in its entirety one of its great treasures, the 1640 printing of The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre.

For Americans in the post-Civil War years, the most iconic images of the cosmos were largely the work of one man: Étienne Leopold Trouvelot (1827-1895), an artist and amateur astronomer who produced incredible images of the heavens.

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.

It's the birthday of Alfred Hitchcock. To honor the Master of Suspense, our crackerjack team of book experts came up with a list of books that would do him proud: psychological suspense novels that give readers the same creepy, think-y thrill as watching his movies... and feature twists that no one saw coming.

On Sunday morning, July 30, 1916, at 2:08 a.m., one of the worst terrorist attacks in American history took place at Black Tom Island, New Jersey, a shipping facility located in New York Harbor.

As June turned into July in 1863, the residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi faced an increasingly dire summer. The city's newspaper, the Vicksburg Daily Citizen, was remarkable in that it both documented and physically represented the effects of the siege.

Inspired by a reader’s comment on our Angry Birds post, we’re thinking about books where the non-underdogs—a.k.a., those little round pigs with the helmets—wind up on top.

An unassuming black notebook contains the earliest draft of Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, written by hand and with the author’s frequent emendations.

... because it's time for some binge-reading. Start some series that you might want to race through the same way you raced through Making a Murderer.

What would Hanukkah be without potato pancakes?

Saturday, November 14 marks the anniversary of the publication of Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick. In honor of this occasion, I made a "cool, collected dive" into the Library's collections, to share early editions, illustrated works, whale charts, and even scrimshaw—works that speak to the universe within this leviathan of a novel.

We love 1000+-page novels here at NYPL—but we also love to see our favorite long-form writers apply their talents to shorter pieces.