Blog Posts by Subject: Magazines, Journals and Serials

Another year has passed and with the beginning of the New Year comes the excitement of a “fresh start” – the endless possibilities for what we can do and achieve in the 365 days that lay ahead of us.

Are you one of the people that when they hear the words “New Year’s resolution” your first reaction is to roll your eyes? Some people think of resolutions as a bad thing, as something that will not be done, a broken promise of some sort. Why not look at resolutions as guidelines to help us get to where we want? I bet you never 

Food is a Feminist IssueTuesday is the second of the Wertheim Study scholars' lecture series: Singular and Collective: Radical Women Artists [in NYC during the 1970s].  This one, by Dr. Aseel Sawalha, is the collective part.  She's going to examine the scene from the perspective of anthropology, focusing on two women's arts collectives: The

Have you ever found yourself looking for a review of a great painting show you saw in a Chelsea gallery four months ago?  Or, perhaps you saw the name of a new photographer working on Marc Jacobs’ ads and want to know more about the artist.  The Art and Picture Collections at the Mid-Manhattan Library offer art periodicals to take home from the last couple of years.  We can also help you find articles and reviews recently published or from years past in our

In 2002, we had our first public program in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room, it was a collaboration with CLMP (Council of Literary Magazines & Presses) called “the Magathon”. The Library and CLMP shared the same goal, to support and celebrate literary magazines and what better place to hold the event then a beautiful public space, that collected and housed a vast collection of contemporary literary magazines.

This event and collaboration has continued every 

"The Poet as critic" is the topic for the next Periodically Speaking: Focus on Poetry event and we'll appropriately be featuring the Mineapolis-based journal Rain Taxi. Rain Taxi is an eclectic, thoughtful publication, filled to the brim four times a year with literary criticism, interviews and reviews of poetry, non fiction & graphic novels. Although it covers the spectrum of American publishing at its heart are small presses and 

Do you have something to say?

Are you looking for a place to say it?

Do you like writing poetry?

Do you want to learn more about poems and Zines?

Then this might be the program for you.

Join us Monday from 4:00pm to 5:00pm at the Epiphany Branch for a Zine Poetry Workshop. The workshop will meet every Monday (except Memorial Day) until June 7.

Each week you can read some exciting poetry and work on writing some poems of your own. At the end of the program, pick your 

Final Week of National Poetry Month

Reader’s Den friends, we’ve come to the fourth and final installment of our month-long celebration of verse. I give you a poem from fellow New Yorker Don Marquis, originally published in 1915. Check out discussion questions after the break, and post comments!

SO LET THEM PASS, THESE SONGS OF MINE

by Don Marquis

So let them pass, these songs of mine, Into oblivion, nor repine; Abandoned ruins of large schemes, Dimmed lights adrift from nobler dreams,

Weak wings I sped on quests divine, 

Working as an archivist I often come across collection items that change the way I see the world around me. I had such an experience recently when processing a manuscript collection. As I sorted through the papers of a woman who had donated her papers to the library, an article title caught my eye, “Is Feminism Dead?”

Those who are interested in the Feminist movement will remember the Time magazine cover from 1998 that asked this question, featuring the images of four women across a stark black 

Want to know when a journal’s first issue was published? What that issue # 1 looked like? Need to track down the editor for those impossible to find back issues? Discover what new titles are missing from the collection?

Premiere Issues: An Archive of Magazine Firsts answers these questions and many more that persistently plague serials librarians. The site’s mission “to provide a home for those first issues to live, be read and shared by an international audience,” was 

On quitting his classes at Harvard in 1927, Edwin Land moved to New York and became a regular user of the library’s Science Division. His goal: the manufacture of a polarizing light filter, the basic idea behind Polaroid sunglasses. Between the library and a variety of makeshift labs, he eventually figured out how to embed microscopic crystals of “herapathite” in molten sheets of plastic and align them all in one direction. He named the invention Polaroid, and used the name again when he invented his instant photography. Land had discovered the identity of the crucial 

What better way to kick off your election night then an evening in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room – relax, listen to great new writers introduced by their editors, join us for a glass of wine afterward, all still with plenty of time to catch the election results. The line up begins with Editor Thaddeus Rutkowski (Many Mountains Moving) introducing fiction writer Jon Swan, followed by Levi Rubeck

Literary magazine aficionados, myself included, will meet up in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room at HSSL as Periodically Speaking returns on Tuesday, October 14th. It’s a thrill to begin our 4th season hosting the series, which aims to connect editors, writers, readers, librarians, and lovers of literature & lit mags with each other, and the Library’s one-of-a-kind collection. Each evening highlights three periodicals, with editors of each introducing an emerging writer. The cool