Hundreds of images from the Cia Fornaroli Collection illustrate the rich
history of Italian dance. The collection includes designs, lithographs, ephemera,
and more.
Several thousand items ranging from historical documents and rare visual materials to contemporary photo-journalism, relating to the entirety of African American history from the 16th century to the present; selected in the course of developing the NYPL website "African American Migration Experience."
369 prints and drawings by Simon van de Passe (1595-1647), George Catlin (1796-1872), and Karl Bodmer (1809-1893), dating from 1627 to the 1830s; 227 gelatin silver and platinum prints by photographers Edward S. Curtis (1868-1954), Karl E. Moon (1878-1948), and Frank A. Rinehart (1862-1928), and sculptor Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1958), from the late 1890s to 1927.
Thousands of examples of the covers of popular American sheet music from 1890-1922,
the first decades of a much larger collection that stretches to the present.
Sixteen scrapbooks containing close to 10,000 wood-engravings by 19th-century
master illustrator Alexander Anderson, considered one of America's earliest
and finest wood-engravers.
Over 500 photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations from the personal collection of materials related to baseball and other sports gathered by the early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding.
This collection includes 19th-century studio portraits of players and teams of the day, rare images, photographs, and original drawings.
Hundreds of prints relating to tobacco, from an exceptional extra-illustrated
copy of Fairholt's
Tobacco: Its History and Lore (1859).
Over 1,000 prints and photographs (mostly albumen, hand-colored albumen and gelatin silver
prints) of East, Southeast and South Asia from the 18th century to
the early 20th century, drawn from portfolios, photographic albums, photographically
illustrated books and archival collections. Subjects include architecture, scenes of daily life,
portraits of major political, religious and artistic figures of the time, "exotica,"
staged photographs for the tourist trade and travel postcards.
Hundreds of black and white photographs by Dinanda H. Nooney (d. 2004) documenting
almost 200 families or individuals in their Brooklyn homes in the late 1970s.
Hundreds of portraits - prints and photographs - picturing more than 120 authors writing in English, primarily from the 1860s to the 1920s, and later, organized alphabetically by sitter.
Several dozen images, including book illustrations and print series, reflecting
literary and cultural history and the role of women during the late 18th and
early 19th centuries.
66 photogravure portraits of artists, writers, statesmen and other public figures,
primarily American and English, in photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn's 1913
Men of Mark (from 1904 to 1913) and his 1922
More Men of Mark
(from 1913 to 1922).
260 portrait photographs, from about 1880-1900, chiefly albumen cabinet cards
and cartes de visite, of radical figures, and a variety of statesmen, authors,
artists, actresses and other notable, primarily European, cultural figures.
The backs of these cards are also viewable.
Hundreds of black and white photographs by Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) from her
Changing New York Works Progress Administration/ Federal Art Project.
The Library's collection holds about 80% of the project's 302 images; this
presentation includes variant and discarded images, plus other work Abbott
produced as a project employee.
Thousands of maps of North America from the earliest printed portrayals to
the close of the 19th century; multiple versions and editions allow for historical
comparisons.
Nearly 600 series (totaling thousands of individual cards) whose titles begin
with the first three letters of the alphabet, from before 1900 to the mid-20th
century. Viewable front and back.
Over 200 photographs and drawings relating to the work, facilities and Civil War
locales associated with the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC); forms
Series XXXIII of the United States Sanitary Commission Records, 1861-1872.
Thousands of photographs of Indonesian costumes, theatrical performances, and
dance movements taken by scholar Claire Holt and others, collected by her in
travels through the region in the 1930s and later.
More than 1,300 digital images depict elevation views and floor plans for
middle and upper class apartment buildings from New York City's pre-World War
I residential building boom.
Illustrated books from the 16th century to the early 20th depicting the
animals of the world. Based on the scholarly bibliography of the same title by
Miriam Gross, published in
Biblion, The Bulletin of The New York Public Library in 1994.
An assemblage of about two dozen (and growing) various and representative plate
books, portfolios of paintings and prints, and illustrated surveys on costume
and customs of people around the world, principally in the 19th century.
Scores of dance photographs feature specific dancers, and range from publicity
stills to professional photographers' vintage prints.
Thousands of postcards (photomechanical prints, primarily in color and on warm white
stock; 3.5 x 5.5 inches or smaller), ca. 1898-1920s, featuring images of North
American landscapes and cityscapes, including views of well-known streets,
buildings, historic monuments, natural scenery, industry, transportation, and
daily life. Some series reproduce art works and illustrations.
Several rare and unusual published resources of interest to students of western
dress and fashion from the 19th to the early 20th century. Includes historical
surveys as well as manufacturers' booklets and sample swatch catalogs.
26,000 color snapshot photographs taken in 1999, recording the streetscape,
block by block, of Manhattan south of Canal Street, and arranged in an archive
by neighborhood and block.
More than 2,000 original specimens of book jackets from trade books acquired
routinely by the Research Libraries.
Over 200 large albumen prints from the 1860s and 1870s of American Western landscape.
The locations and photographers include mammoths views of Yosemite Valley by
Carleton E. Watkins and Charles L. Weed, the route of the Union Pacific Railroad
through the Rocky Mountains by A.J. Russell, the Geographical surveys west
of the one hundredth meridian (the Wheeler survey) by Timothy O'Sullivan and
William Bell, and a collection of mammoth views by William Henry Jackson.
Over 2,000 maps of New York City, including Manhattan and Brooklyn "fire insurance maps"
from the 1850s-1860, showing streets, blocks, tax lots, natural and manmade features,
buildings, neighborhoods, and more.
More than 1,000 images encompassing 1,200 years of Japanese book art, including Buddhist
sutras, painted manuscripts, portraits, landscapes, calligraphic verse, and photographic
books, with related drawings and woodblock prints.
Photographs (gelatin silver prints) relating to Ellis Island and immigration
into the United States in the early 20th century, ranging from portraits of
individual immigrants by Augustus Francis Sherman to views of the Ellis Island
facility and its grounds by Edwin Levick and others.
Twenty primary source illustrated pattern books, scrapbooks, and a set of
original French goldsmith's drawings from the late 18th to early 20th-centuries
featuring mainly interior decoration, furnishings, furniture patterns, and
views relating to the Empire and Regency Styles.
Original prints by the Japanese painter and woodcut designer Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806).
Fine French book bindings of dozens of titles, some in multiple volumes,
principally from the last third of the 19th century into the first decade of
the 20th, offer a window into the original bequest by collector William Augustus
Spencer (1855-1912) of more than 200 volumes.
More than 200 photographs by Carl Van Vechten: includes Gertrude Stein and
Alice B. Toklas at home in France; plus portraits of Stein in America and of
performers associated with Stein's 1934 opera
Four Saints in Three Acts.
109 page images presenting the contents of a scrapbook titled "The Single
Tax," containing photographs and caricatures of Henry George (1839-1897), the founder of
the 19th-century reform 'single tax' movement.
Over 30,00 portraits of a wide-range of public figures, including political, religious, cultural,
literary and artistic personalities, with an emphasis on the 16th through the 19th centuries.
Includes some original prints, but consists principally of printed pictures.
Thousands of images, reproducing, often in their entirety, important illustrated
books published in Russia and adjacent areas. Most notably, includes the several
series issued by 19th-century collector and scholar, Dimitrii Aleksandrovich
Rovinskii.
Over 100 illuminations selected from the 1,156 extant pages of the
Padua Ashkenazi
Mahzor, a medieval Jewish festival prayer book;
Hamburg Haggadah (1731);
Ketubbot (1638);
and
Xanten Bible.
Several hundred images, from the 16th to the 20th century, draw upon a wide
range of published engineering rarities and related original holdings. The
selection highlights a diverse range of illustration primarily in civil and
mechanical engineering.
Thousands of images dating from the 16th to the early 20th-centuries,
mostly engravings and lithographs, with some drawings, predominantly of composers
and musicians but also including portraits of actors, heads of state, music
patrons, nobility, philosophers, poets, printers, theorists, and writers, among
others, amassed by Joseph Muller, a private collector.
More than 500 silver gelatin photographic prints depicting American social conditions
and labor, including immigrants at Ellis Island and construction of the Empire
State Building, Hine's principal subjects.
A single gem of a "friendship book" from the circle of Percy Byssche Shelley, created by Anne Wagner in the early 19th century.
This collection will grow as additional similar items are identified in the Library's manuscript collections.
Hundreds of photographs and prints, in albums and rare published volumes,
present the territories and countries associated with Portugal and Spain in
the New World, from Mexico to Argentina, and parts of the Caribbean.
1,717 color photographs of Broadway theater marquees and theater facades from 1997 to 2001 by Christopher J. Frith.
More than 2,000 manuscript pages and associated illuminations
dating from the 9th through the 16th centuries give vivid testimony to the
creative impulses of the often nameless craftsmen who continually discovered
new ways of animating the contents of hand-produced books.
Over 600 images, primarily original photographs, plus selected published sources,
on the themes of traffic, transit and water. The digital collection includes
mass transit proposals and projects, dating from 1867; the multi-county Catskill
Aqueduct system that still supplies the city's water; and the pioneering Holland
Tunnel for vehicular traffic under the Hudson River.
Several thousand prints and photographs contained in works from the 17th century
to the beginning of the 20th century. These include books illustrated
with prints or photographs, photograph albums, and archival compilations; the
processes represented range from engravings to lithographs, and from salt prints
to heliogravures.
Thousands of menus beginning with the oldest items in the collection from 1851.
The collection is strongest for the period between 1890 and 1910. Organization
is primarily chronological by date or range of dates.
150 salt and albumen print photographs in two albums, of prisoners confined in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, in August 1857 and November 1866.
Thousands of art and scientific prints, illustrating medicinal plants, spectacular
garden flowers, exotic tropical blooms, trees and ferns. Includes many different
printmaking techniques, from woodcuts to stipple engravings to color-printed
lithographs.
Several thousand original prints, drawings, watercolors, and printed book
illustrations relating to early American history, primarily from the period
leading to the American Revolution through the early years of the nation.
More than 200 images of algae specimens, title pages, contents lists, and
other texts, in cyantoype (blueprint), plus inscriptions and parts' wrappers.
Tens of thousands of photographs of actors and actresses, in character and as themselves, from the 19th century to recent years.
Several thousand images from nearly 100 volumes on decorative art and surface
ornament, mainly portfolios of plates, pattern books, and scrapbook compilations.
Several thousand original and copy photographs; albumen, platinum and silver gelatin
prints; 1860s-1920s. The photographs are presented in original archival order:
two series, "published" and "unpublished" photographs, exist for each of the
fifteen volumes published in the 15-volume series
The Pageant of America:
A Pictorial History of the United States commemorating the nation's sesquicentennial
in 1926.
306 toy theatre prints portraying plays and actors in character, from the
early- to mid-19th century; these prints comprise the visual materials in the
William Appleton collection of theatrical correspondence and ephemera, 1697-1930.
More than 54,000 New York City archival photographs (and their captioned versos)
from the 1870s-1970s arranged by borough and street; the majority are exterior
building views and neighborhood scenes from the 1910s-1940s.
More than 750 images from public relations materials, principally black
and white photographs and accompanying press releases, for the automotive and
truck lines of General Motors, during the years 1902-1938.
Over 30,000 images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, created mostly before 1923 and selected from the over 1,000,000 images in the Mid-Manhattan Library's Picture Collection. The Picture Collection is particularly rich in images of New York City, American history, and clothing and dress.
Hundreds of images from the 13th through the early 20th century,
in the fields of astronomy, chemistry, geology, mathematics, medicine, and
physics, as represented by manuscript illuminations, engravings, lithographs,
and photographs.
Over 1,000 original prints, drawings, and maps, selected primarily from The Phelps
Stokes Collection, as well as from several other Library collections, featuring
views of American towns and cities and representations of historical events,
scenes, places, and battles relating to the United States, from 1497 to 1899.
The selection of images is the same as that featured in Gloria Gilda Deák's
1988 book of the same title.
213 posters, placards, and broadsides comprising one of the largest assemblages
of such posters outside of Russia.
Thousands of photographs, lantern slides and postcards documenting New York
Public Library buildings, collections, and programs, as well as those of NYPL
predecessor institutions including the New York Free Circulating Library. Major
subjects include the Astor and Lenox Library buildings, Branch Libraries in
the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island, and the construction of the Library's
landmark Central Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
Thousands of chromolithographs of publisher proofs by Louis Prang & Company
in seventeen scrapbooks, and advertising cards for Prang and other firms in
six scrapbooks.
An appreciative selected collection of eighteen memorabilia photographs
from the papers of Lucille Lortel (1900-1999), the woman regarded as the founder
of Off-Broadway, the second wave of little theatre in America.
Thousands of original Russian and East European photographs from the late 19th- and early
20th-centuries, in more than 150 albums.
Nearly 3,000 etchings, lithographs, and some drawings, by prominent 19th-century
printmakers. Most of these works are part of the S.P. Avery Collection, complemented
by holdings found in the general Print Collection. Together they represent the
Print Collection's complete holdings of Félix Bracquemond, Félix
Buhot, Francisco Goya, Charles Jacque, Edouard Manet, Charles Méryon,
and Camille Pissarro.
Selected images of hunting, sporting scenes, and related subjects in prints and drawings by the noted British artist Henry Alken (1785-1851),
the best-known English sporting artist of his day and still one of the most popular.
More than 700 postcards depicting the buildings, scenery, and daily life of Staten
Island from the late 19th-century until well into the 20th-century.
Several hundred prints and photographs offering the complete content of a
wide range of selected image collections and illustrated monographs: Hudson
River mansions, including Washington Irving's home and vicinity in the
1860s; street views by Alice Austen from 1896; a panorama of Fifth Avenue from
1911, and more.
Several hundred photomechanical reproductions from the pages of motor vehicle
(automobiles and some trucks) manufacturers' catalogs from 1909, in the first
decade of the automobile industry. Primarily monochrome, interspersed with
surprisingly lavish color plates, the images include parts diagrams, engine
works, and model inventory.
The thousands of items in this digital presentation are a sampling of an archive
of more than 75,000 images of theatrical personalities and productions. Images
in the current presentation represent glass plate and acetate negatives primarily.
Over 1,000 American and European posters printed from 1893 through the first years of
the 20th-century. The collection represents the inception and heyday of magazine,
book, and newspaper posters of the last decade of the 19th-century, and
well into the 20th-century.
Over 20,000 prints, drawings, watercolors, and printed book and magazine
illustrations of military costume as well as military medals, regalia, insignia,
coats of arms, and regimental flags, from most times and places except the
United States.
Stereoscopic views, or stereographs, were as varied and popular in the 19th century
as television continues to be in our time. This presentation will eventually include
all the United States stereoscopic views in the Dennis Collection (more than 40,000
items), front and back, organized by State or Subject Series.
Over 1,000 items, including manuscripts, printed works, and portraits of Walt Whitman (1819-1892),
the leading American poet of the 19th century.
Three original books in "relief etching" by William Blake, who composed the
texts, designed the texts and decorations, and printed the pages:
America:
A Prophecy (1793 [1794?]),
Europe: A Prophecy (1794), and
Milton
(1804 [i.e. 1808?]).
Hundreds of photographs, prints, drawings, and other images documenting the
International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congresses (IWSA) at Copenhagen, 1906;
Amsterdam, 1908; Budapest, 1913; and other conferences. Featured are
photographs of associates of Rosika Schwimmer such as Jane Addams,
Anita Augspurg, Carrie Chapman Catt, Vilma Glucklich, Lida Gustava
Heymann, and other notable women.
Nearly 400 images reproducing two amateur albums of drawings and photographs
by Americans serving in France; a series of German photographic postcards;
and a French automaker's published album.
Placards from the two leading centers of Yiddish theater in their respective
heydays: New York, 1890s-1910s (64 images), and Buenos Aires, 1930s-1940s (28
images)
