A standout amid the outpouring of books on Lewis.

Some highlights from our March/April issue.

John Pattison and C. Christopher Smith: “Slow Church.”

Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven.”

A volume of her essays and a collection in her honor.

Paw and Order

The Girl Next Door.

Take and read.

J. Richard Middleton’s “holistic eschatology.”

Previewing the March/April issue of Books & Culture.

The Story of Science.

I’m a big fan of ZEIT Now1 as an application hosting provider. The way the service abstracts all of the cloud computing details and allows teams to focus on building and deploying web applications is fantastic. That said, I had a lot of trouble setting up secure environment variables for my first application to use....

Sometimes when catalogers examine a book, we find that parts of its structure use recycled materials from other books. These materials are often invisible, hidden away under outer coverings of paper or leather, and revealed only when an item is damaged or taken apart for conservation. But sometimes, the entire outer cover itself is made from...

The post Rare Books Revealed: Parchment Repurposed appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

A series of remarkable photographs from the library’s Geographic File (PR20) documents the construction of the Central Park Reservoir,  located between 86th and 96th streets.  Built between 1858 and 1862, the 106-acre reservoir is 40 feet deep and holds over a billion gallons of water. Once a critical part of the city’s fresh water system, it received water from the Croton...

The post Treasure Trove: Constructing the Central Park Reservoir appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

In early 1944 Ann Clare Brokaw, the daughter of Clare Boothe Luce, was killed in a car accident. The loss of her only child devastated Clare Boothe Luce, who was then finishing up her first term in the United States House of Representatives. Although she managed to win reelection, the trauma persisted. Searching for solace,...

The post Clare Boothe Luce – The Ambassador appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

In time for its 95th anniversary, the Coney Island Boardwalk has become a New York City landmark! On May 15, 2018, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the wooden walkway a scenic landmark (read the designation report here). It joins others around the city like Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn and Morningside Park in Manhattan. The Boardwalk–officially called the Riegelmann Boardwalk...

The post Brooklyn’s Boardwalk Empire appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Tiny Canal Park, a .66-acre triangular green space that sits on Canal Street between Washington and West Streets, hides a substantial history. The city’s ownership of this land dates back to the Dongan Charter in 1686 and the Montgomery Charter in 1730. By the time this land was approved as a site for the Clinton...

The post The Return of Canal Park appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

An earlier post introduced readers to a sampling of artwork from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings. Today’s post highlights works by William C. McNulty, an American painter, illustrator, etcher and art instructor whose work is part of the Boyd Collection. McNulty was born in Ogden, Utah in 1884. He began his career as  an editorial...

The post Selections from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings, part 2 appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

While working on the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library’s hidden collections cataloging project, I’ve found some examples of the different methods authors and printers used to fix small errors in a text after an item was printed. Shown below are a few examples of the corrections that were made directly to the page. In the first...

The post Rare Books Revealed: Text Corrections in Printed Books appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Despite the effects of the Great Depression, the City Planning Commission under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia reported for the period 1920–1939 a staggering increase in New York City motor vehicle registrations from 225,000 to nearly one million. As a result of the evolving needs of constituents, and with a glimmering post-war economic boom on the horizon,...

The post Highway to Hell: Tensions in the La Guardia Administration appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

In 1725, a then unknown nineteen-year-old journeyman printer named Benjamin Franklin printed A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, responding to William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated. Later, having second thoughts about the soundness of his argument, Franklin destroyed most of the remaining copies of what was already a small run. Fortunately, his distribution of...

The post Copying History: A Handmade Facsimile of a Rare Franklin Imprint appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Modern library conservation was born in the aftermath of a catastrophic flood in Florence, Italy on November 4, 1966. Water from the Arno River devastated the collections of the National Central Library of Florence. An international team of bookbinders and restorers was assembled to save what they could; however in many cases the damage was irreversible. Many lessons were...

The post Lab Notes: The Florence Flood and the emergence of library conservation appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

This Sunday will be the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I, a war that remains etched in the collective memory for the physical and psychological toll wrought on those who lived through it. With that in mind, it seems fitting to mark this occasion through the words of a soldier who...

The post “The Good Lord protected me”: A soldier’s letter on the Meuse-Argonne Offensive appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

We are upon a new year and a new political season, as recently-elected governors and legislators take their oaths and move into their offices. Hiring staff is always the first task at hand.  Does one “clean house” of the holdovers or retain them? This question may have had its most relevance in the early American...

The post A Cabinet Staff of Cutthroats, Picaroons, and Nincumpoops appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

The fact that Russian World War I soldiers remained prisoners of war well after the November 1918 Armistice is one of the more obscure aspects of the war’s history. But with civil war raging in Russia, concerns arose over repatriating soldiers that might return to reinforce the Bolsheviks. This meant large number of Russian soldiers remained in...

The post Camp Sagan: The Forgotten Prisoners of World War I appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

If the cold weather kept you from seeing the recent Super Blood Wolf Moon (a.k.a. the total lunar eclipse of January 21, 2019), here’s a celestial event you can view from the comfort of your favorite electronic device: a photograph of a rare, total solar eclipse that darkened the skies over New York City on January 24,...

The post Treasure Trove: The Solar Eclipse of 1925 appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

This third installment of selections from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings (be sure to see part 1 and part 2) focuses on the work of Edith Nankivell (1896-1984), who, with 46 prints, figures prominently in Box 3. In researching her, I discovered that she is in fact the daughter of Frank...

The post Selections from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings, part 3 appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

An unassuming French pamphlet sits on the shelves at the New-York Historical Society. However, there is far more than meets the eye beneath its aged, brown wrappers. Premier rapport fait au nom du Comité de salut public, sur les moyens d’extirper la mendicité dans les campagnes, & sur les secours que doit accorder la République...

The post Tinker, Tailor, Printer, Spy: Pierrette Jeanne Sophie Charpentier de Mailly appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

For much of the 19th century, New York City’s public transportation was racially segregated, and African Americans were forced to ride on specially designated horse-drawn street cars.  Newspapers documented acts of resistance to these policies of segregation by members of the African American community, some of whom took the street car companies to court. Three examples are cited here. On Sunday,...

The post Before Rosa Parks: Segregation on New York City Street Cars appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Set to commence on January 17, 1920, the great social experiment of Prohibition had already begun with a “dry run” for Americans adapting to the restriction of alcohol inspired by World War I. That was followed by a full year anticipating the event through the process of Constitutional amendment and the passage of enforcement legislation...

The post Now on View–“Padlocked”: New York’s Prohibition Years appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

“Dear Gellatly, Did you leave a pair of dark leather gloves here? Church.” Writing to his friends, the artist Frederick Stuart Church (1842-1924) was a man of few words. Most of his letters were full of casual thoughts, questions and updates on the weather. Known for his love of animals, Church enlivened his letters with colorful cartoons...

The post Bears and Pie: The Illustrated Letters of Frederick Stuart Church appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Each era spawns its acronyms. (POTUS, FLOTUS, and SCOTUS, anyone?) Some World War II acronyms remain familiar, like WAC, for Women’s Army Corps, and its earlier incarnation, WAAC, Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Maybe you know of the WAVES—Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service–a branch of the U.S. Navy in which women could enlist. But chances are you’ve never heard of...

The post “Till Victory is History”: Remembering the W.I.V.E.S. of World War II appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

The story of one of New York’s brightest and most dedicated physicians is often eclipsed by his reputation as America’s first wood engraver. Both stories, however, are tied together in a biography of tragedy, strife, hope, and renewal. Alexander Anderson (1775-1870) was not only a doctor and an artist, but a man of great sentiment,...

The post “Of Some Consequence.” Alexander Anderson: Distinguished Doctor, Accomplished Artist appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

With this post, the New-York Historical Society Library introduces a new quarterly feature in which we will highlight the collections for which detailed finding aids were published over the prior three months. All collections receive at least a summary description in our catalog, BobCat. But many collections have such depth or are simply so large...

The post New Finding Aids, 1st quarter, 2019 appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Update on April 14, 2020: Hart Island is back in the news for the most tragic of reasons: It’s currently being used as a burial ground for victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the time since this post was first published, control of Hart Island was transferred to New York City’s Department of Parks and burials are no...

The post Rare photographs of Hart Island, New York’s potter’s field appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Sometimes people leave behind a little piece of history that is worth so much to modern day scholars. We do not know who William Worcester Dudley was, but between December 1785 and October 1786, he kept a food diary that tracked every meal he ate for breakfast, dinner, and supper. While it was not uncommon for people to...

The post Victuals, Mincemeat, Pudding, and Veal: William Worcester Dudley’s Food Diary appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

There was a time when Thomas Cole, the celebrated landscape painter and Hudson River School artist, was an unknown portraitist travelling by foot across the northeast, determined to make a living for himself with nothing but a dollar in his pocket. Cole’s eventual success was due in part to that incredible drive, his passionate commitment...

The post “Nature around me in perfect beauty”: Thomas Cole to John Trumbull appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

In the spring of 1869, a two-column-inch piece titled “The Great New York Fire in 1835” began appearing in newspapers around the country. Written as a reminiscence “clipped from the columns of the Philadelphia Inquirer,” the piece was actually an advertisement for Aetna Insurance, describing the moment when Aetna’s president had first informed his board...

The post The Great New York Fire of 1835 and the Marketing of Disaster appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

This post is the second in a new quarterly series in which the New-York Historical Society highlights the collections for which detailed finding aids were published over the prior three months. All collections receive at least a summary description in our catalog, Bobcat. But many collections have such depth or are simply so large or...

The post New Finding Aids, 2nd Quarter 2019 appeared first on New-York Historical Society.