Blog Posts by Subject: Advertising

The Theatre Cabinets (or T-Cabinets as we call them) of the Billy Rose Theatre Division are packed full of objects large and small. The cabinets are a repository for all the three-dimensional items that have accompanied our larger collections or have been given to the division separately as a gift. I absolutely love the T-cabinets. Being hidden in the back of a locked cage and full of mysterious items is only part of the allure. The other part is the extreme variety of the items themselves.

I 

First they invented the automobile. Then... marketing: How are we going to sell these things?

One marketing tool was the catalog. And that gives a good opening to briefly talk about NYPL's extensive collection of historical automobile catalogs, which can be found at SIBL.

First, let me mention two existing resources on the NYPL website for automobile catalogs:

The Music Division has an amazing amount of sheet music, much of which is not listed in the online catalog. Over the years, some of this sheet music has been compiled into different collections. One of these collections called, P.I. Marches or Popular Instrumental Marches, contains marches that were arranged for the piano.

While compiling a database of these marches I came across several that were written as advertisements. These marches were published between 1897 and 1923. They represent a range of companies whose 

Lincoln Center is all abuzz as it ramps up for another Fashion Week. Fashion luminaries, hovering press reps, and harried show staff walk briskly across the Plaza towards the next scheduled event. The sense of anticipation is accompanied by the throbbing bass from the show tent, where models strut their stuff. For the in-crowd, the new look of tomorrow eclipses the desire to reflect on what has come before. But the scholars just next door in The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts relish the past. While Lincoln Center has always 

Toby Daniels. Photo: CrowdcentricToby Daniels is a proud, self-proclaimed enabler.

The founder of Social Media Week (which is happening in nine cities, with an opening reception at NYPL, its global event partner) has worked tirelessly for years to bring social media tools into the hands of individuals, businesses, and non profits.

“These tools are essentially available for free,” he said of social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, and so on. “The tools and technology are not a boundary to entry. 

St. George Library Center hosts a book discussion of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell on Monday, January 24, 2011 at 6:30PM.

About this book from NYPL Catalog entry: 

"An introduction to the Tipping Point theory explains how minor changes in ideas and products can increase their popularity and how small 

Like a repeated news ticker, once again Facebook  is in the news. As a high player in the social media marketplace, it comes as no surprise that Facebook would lead headlines, but unlike Twitter , who caught media attention for reaching a record of 5 billion  tweets last week, Facebook's latest news round is not so glamorous. It does boil down, however, to the fact that social media is a marketplace.

On January 24, 1984 Apple Inc. introduced us to the Macintosh.

During a break in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII (January 22, 1984) a television commercial by Apple was aired to promote the Macintosh personal computer. The ad showed an unnamed heroine (played by Anya Major) wearing red shorts, red running shoes, and a white tank top with a Picasso-style picture of Apple’s Macintosh computer, running through an