All Collection Guides
Context, links, related resources and images from a variety of NYPL digitized collections.
500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection
Hundreds of images from the Cia Fornaroli Collection illustrate the rich history of Italian dance. The collection includes designs, lithographs, ephemera, and more.
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arts
Africana & Black History
Several thousand items ranging from historical documents and rare visual materials to contemporary photo-journalism, relating to the entirety of African American history from the 16th century to the present; selected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."
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arts |
culture |
history
Cabinet Card Portraits in the Collection of Radical Publisher Benjamin R. Tucker
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.
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arts |
culture |
history
Changing New York: Photographs by Berenice Abbott, 1935-1938
Hundreds of black and white photographs of New York City by Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) from her Changing New York Works Progress Administration/ Federal Art Project, plus other work Abbott produced as a project employee.
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cities |
history
"Drugstore Photographs, Or, A Trip Along the Yangtze River, 1999;" Lower Manhattan Block-by-Block by Dylan Stone
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.
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cities
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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arts |
printing
Early Landscape Photography of the American West
Over 200 large albumen prints from the 1860s and 1870s of American Western landscape. The locations and photographers include 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, and others.
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history |
science
Early Real Estate Atlases of New York
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.
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cities |
history
Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan
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.
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arts |
culture
Ellis Island Photographs from the Collection of William Williams, Commissioner of Immigration, 1902-1913
Photographs 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.
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culture |
history
Icons and Images of Cultures: Plate Books from the Russian Empire, Early Soviet Russia, and Eastern Europe, 1730-1935
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.
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arts |
culture |
history
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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arts |
culture |
printing
Illustrated Classics of Engineering from the William Barclay Parsons Collection and Others
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.
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industry
Joseph Muller Collection of Music and Other Portraits
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.
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arts
The Middle East in Early Prints and Photographs
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.
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cities |
culture |
history
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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culture |
printing
Mountjoy Prison Portraits of Irish Independence: Photograph Albums in the Thomas A. Larcom Collection
150 salt and albumen print photographs in two albums, of prisoners confined in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, in August 1857 and November 1866.
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culture |
history
Nature Illustrated: Flowers, Plants, and Trees, 1550-1900
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.
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cities |
science
The Picture Collection of The New York Public Library
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.
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arts |
cities |
culture |
history
Pictures of Science: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration
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.
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industry |
science
Picturing America, 1497-1899: Prints, Maps, and Drawings bearing on the New World Discoveries and on the Development of the Territory that is now the United States
Over 1,000 original prints, drawings, and maps, featuring views of American towns and cities, representations of historical events, scenes, places, and battles.
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arts |
cities |
culture |
history
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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culture |
history |
printing
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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arts |
printing
Sporting Sketches by Henry Thomas Alken
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.
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arts |
science
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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arts |
printing
Uniforms and Regimental Regalia: The Vinkhuijzen Collection of Military Costume Illustration
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.
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culture |
history
United States in Stereo: In the Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views
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.
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cities |
culture |
history
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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arts |
culture |
printing
Walt Whitman Manuscripts
Over 1,000 items, including manuscripts, printed works, and portraits of Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the leading American poet of the 19th century.
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arts
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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arts |
printing
Woman Suffrage and Feminism Photographs in the Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection
Hundreds of images documenting the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congresses held from 1906-1913 at Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Budapest, and others. Featured are associates of Rosika Schwimmer such as Jane Addams, Anita Augspurg, Carrie Chapman Catt, Vilma Glucklich, and Lida Gustava Heymann.
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culture
Wonders: Images of the Ancient World
Over 1,700 images of the civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and other ancient Mediterranean cultures as conceived and depicted by artists and travelers from the 18th to the early 20th century, as represented in book and periodical illustrations, engravings, lithographs and photographs. A wide range of subjects includes arms and armor, architecture, furniture, pottery, mythology, religion, theater and the Seven Wonders of the World.
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arts |
cities |
culture |
history
