Blog Posts by Subject: Manuscripts and Rare Books

The Doughnut Boy and Other Poems offers a glimpse of New York City through the eyes of a sassy little beret-wearing, doughnut-loving, public-transit-taking, library-visiting child.

Madame du Châtelet was a French noblewoman of the Enlightenment who came from a wealthy family, married into a position of prominence, raised several children, and studied as a member of the Republic of Letters. However, in her native France, the Academy of Sciences, universities, and many intellectual gatherings excluded women. She was forced to pursue a path of independent study.

In 1797, Isaac Davis, a rope maker of Boston officially had his name changed. To help him stand out from the crowd of other Isaac Davises, he added a ‘P’ to his name as a middle initial: Isaac P. Davis.

Curator Steven G. Fullwood discusses the importance of handwritten letters, an intimate component of our newest exhibition, Curators' Choice: Black Life Matters.

Universal letter-writers were guidebooks meant to teach young men and women the art of writing and speaking fluently on a variety of subjects—including love.

The collection, which was acquired by The Library in 2014, fills over 200 boxes and will be a vital resource for the study of Wolfe's writing process, his journalism-based research methods, and the creation of his hugely successful works.

What started as a simple comparison of beautifully illustrated books on fashionable dress, trades’ dress, and ethnic costume held in both the Art and Architecture Collection and the Rare Book Division turned into an open-ended bibliographic exercise with many rabbit holes to get lost in.

A look at the papers of two brothers who were at the center of New York publishing in the mid-1800s.

To celebrate Lewis Carroll’s upcoming birthday—and my un-birthday!—let’s venture down the rabbit hole to explore depictions of Alice, his most famous creation, here at the library.

Evergreens, pines, conifers. As the year draws to a close, many of us have welcomed these needly trees into our homes as part of long-established Christmas tradition. But before this tradition took root in England (via Germany), one Englishman devoted his life all throughout the year to the genus Pinus.

A Christmas Carol continues, year after year, to be reworked, adapted, dramatized, enjoyed at home, and read in public settings. Perhaps less familiar are the dozens of Christmas stories that Charles Dickens penned in the twenty-five years that followed its publication.

December 17 marks British author, editor, and all-around literary icon Ford Madox Ford’s 141st birthday. To celebrate the occasion, I explored his writings in the Rare Book Division—and found some fascinating glimpses into his life and work.

It’s so ubiquitous that we take it for granted, but this super-typeface has its own origin story.

The options for cooking a turkey are seemingly endless, but leave it to founding father Benjamin Franklin to invent one more — electrocution.

The Cranach Press enlisted the help of an international stable of artists and scholars to produce hand-made books that doubled as works of art. My favorite is an edition of Hamlet based on the text of Shakespeare’s Second Quarto.

While the initial printing of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow contained no illustrations, the tale has since inspired many artists to create works evoking the strangely funny but frightful events in the story.

On Halloween, we pull back the curtain between real and unreal, reveling in the spooky, mysterious, and inexplicable. What better way to celebrate the holiday than communing with the spirits and ghosts who reach out to us from the pages of the Rare Book Division?

In honor of the White Whale’s birthday, I have decided—like Herman Melville’s own sub-sub-librarian—to share “a glancing bird’s-eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan” since Moby-Dick’s first appearance in 1851.

Columbus’s voyage made me think of the voyages our books take before arriving on the shelves of the New York Public Library. Who printed it? Who owned it previously? From whom did we buy it? Researchers are often interested in these questions, which all attempt to uncover a book’s provenance. In the Rare Book Division we look for clues, both within the book and in secondary sources, to answer questions of provenance and understand a book’s complete voyage.