Printing & Graphics

Advertising, book binding, dust jackets, friendship books, menus, post cards, posters, trade and greeting cards

Arts & Literature Cities & Buildings Culture & Society History & Geography Industry & Technology Nature & Science Printing & Graphics All Gallery Collections

American Popular Song Sheet Covers, 1890-1922

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.

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America's First Illustrator: Alexander Anderson

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.

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Charting North America: Maps from the Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection and Others

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.

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Cigarette Cards: ABCs

Hundreds of series published from before 1900 to the mid-20th century, totaling tens of thousands of individual cards (viewable front and back). Arranged by letter of the alphabet, they cover an encyclopedic range of subjects, including film stars, sports, and military topics, plants, animals, and monuments of the world.

Detroit Publishing Company Postcards from the Leonard Lauder Postcard Collection

Thousands of postcards (photomechanical prints, primarily in color and on warm white stock, ca. 1898-1920s, featuring views of well-known streets, buildings, historic monuments, natural scenery, industry, transportation, and daily life.

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Dust Jackets from American and European Books, 1926-1947

More than 2,000 original specimens of book jackets from trade books acquired routinely by the Research Libraries.

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French 19th-Century Bindings in the Collection of William A. Spencer

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.

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Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts

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.

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Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts from Western Europe

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.

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Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection, 1851-1930

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.

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Ocean Flowers: Anna Atkins's Cyanotypes of British Algae

Containing more than 200 images of algae specimens, Photographs of British Algae is a landmark in the histories both of photography and of publishing: it is the first photographic work by a woman, and the first book produced entirely by photographic means.

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Ornament and Pattern: Pre-Victorian to Art Deco

Several thousand images from nearly 100 volumes on decorative art and surface ornament, mainly portfolios of plates, pattern books, and scrapbook compilations.

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Posters of the Russian Civil War, 1918-1922

213 posters, placards, and broadsides comprising one of the largest assemblages of such posters outside of Russia.

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Publisher's Proofs and Related Work from L. Prang & Company

Thousands of chromolithographs of publisher proofs by Louis Prang & Company in seventeen scrapbooks, and advertising cards for Prang and other firms in six scrapbooks.

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Samuel Putnam Avery Print Collection and Related Works

Nearly 3,000 etchings, lithographs, and some drawings, by prominent 19th-century printmakers such as of Félix Bracquemond, Félix Buhot, Francisco Goya, Charles Jacque, Edouard Manet, Charles Méryon, and Camille Pissarro.

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Turn of the Century Posters

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.

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Vintage Holiday Postcards

More than 1,800 vintage holiday postcards from the New York Public Library's Picture Collection themed around national celebrations of the United States: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, St. Patrick's Day, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Washington's Birthday, among others.

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William Blake: Illustrated Books

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?]).

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World War I Photograph Albums and Postcards

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.

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