On Thursday, households across America will gather to celebrate Thanksgiving, with turkey taking pride of place on our Thanksgiving tables.  Baste, brine, deep-fry?  (But not frozen, please!)  The options for cooking a turkey are seemingly endless, but leave it to founding father Benjamin Franklin to invent one more — electrocution.

Franklin recounts the event in another letter to his brother, which you can read on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s website.  “I have lately made an experiment in electricity,” he says, “that I desire never never to repeat.”  In other words, don’t try this at home.

[[{"fid":"274495","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Gallery of Fashion (1799)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Gallery of Fashion (1799)"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Gallery of Fashion (1799)","title":"Gallery of Fashion (1799)","height":"200","width":"151","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]The Art & Architecture Collection has a large collection of women’s (and some men’s) 19th century fashion-plate periodicals. While French fashion dominated the 19th century this post features a selection of magazines from England, America and Sweden. French periodicals in the collection will be featured in a separate post. Many non-French publications sometimes featured bound-in French plates and full dress patterns on tissue from French pattern publishers. Because of rapid advances in printing technology, periodical publishing, along with book publishing, took off in the 19th century from a few dozen magazines in the early 1800s to a few thousand by the turn of the 20th century. The following magazines are a small sampling of what the Art & Architecture Collection has to offer from its large and diverse collection of original 19th century periodicals in both plate-only bound collections and full text/plate versions. They present not only a fascinating view of the development of fashion but of illustration as well.

[[{"fid":"274497","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Gallery of Fashion: morning dress (1795)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Morning Dress (1795)"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Gallery of Fashion: morning dress (1795)","title":"Morning Dress (1795)","height":"200","width":"147","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]][[{"fid":"274498","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Gallery of Fashion: mourning dress 1797","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Mourning Dress 1797"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Gallery of Fashion: mourning dress 1797","title":"Mourning Dress 1797","height":"200","width":"143","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]Two of the earliest 19th century English fashion plate periodicals in the collection are a turn of the century publication called Gallery of Fashion (1794-1803. London: N. Heideloff) and a publication that followed a few years later called Records of Fashion and Court Elegance (1807-1809. London: Published under the direction of Mrs. Fiske by J. Shaw, Printers). Subscribers to the first volume of the Gallery of Fashion included Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal, their Royal Highnesses Princesses Augusta and Elizabeth, and the Duchess of York. Included on the list of foreign subscribers was "Her Majesty the Empress of Germany." High quality hand colored engravings of morning and mourning dress, riding dress, afternoon dress, and court dress each with text were featured in each issue.

[[{"fid":"274499","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Records of Fashion (1808)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Records of Fashion (1808)"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Records of Fashion (1808)","title":"Records of Fashion (1808)","height":"250","width":"177","class":"media-element file-default"}}]][[{"fid":"274501","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Rural Dress","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Rural Dress"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Rural Dress","title":"Rural Dress","height":"250","width":"125","class":"media-element file-default"}}]][[{"fid":"274500","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Evening Dress","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Evening Dress"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Evening Dress","title":"Evening Dress","height":"250","width":"177","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]

The Art & Architecture Collection’s bound collection of issues of Records of Fashion is one of only three copies listed in WorldCat in the United States and the only copy listed in New York City. It features lovely hand colored engravings of young women wearing the latest fashions with extensive descriptive text accompanying each plate. The illustrations are simple but charming and more stylized than in some of the periodicals that came later. These are sketches of women with personality that made eye contact and engaged the viewer – which many fashion illustrations of the 19th century did not.  The publication also offered some songs and poetry, music and theater news, and the “Journal of Polite Intelligence”, “Courtly Events”, and “Private Assemblages” (in other words: gossip columns). The “Private Assemblages” column reported on “a grand assembly of the Marchioness of Stafford” held in dangerously inclement weather noting that “the noble Lady…did not forget the exposed domestics and they were regaled with not less than eight hogsheads of porter.” [A wine hogshead contains approximately 79 US gallons]. Records of Fashion is from an era when most women’s dresses were long, loose, high-waisted garments inspired by Greek classicism often described as “Regency” or “Empire.” They appear to be reasonably comfortable garments requiring only soft stays if anything. The garments did not impede a woman’s movement or compromise her health like those that would come to dominate fashion during the 1830s with corsets and crinolines, and later with bustles and straight silhouettes that encumbered movement. (As early as 1827 corsets were described as “slow and fashionable poison”).

[[{"fid":"274502","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Belle Assemblee Parisian: Walking Dress (1818)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Walking Dress (1818)"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Belle Assemblee Parisian: Walking Dress (1818)","title":"Walking Dress (1818)","height":"200","width":"119","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]La Belle Assemblée or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine addressed particularly to Ladies. (1806-1847. London). It is difficult to discuss La Belle Assemblée and the World of Fashion without mentioning the role of Mrs. Mary Ann Bell. Although she is generally acknowledged to be the wife of John Bell, the publisher who at times owned both magazines, she is not mentioned in his biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Whatever the relationship, up to 1821 while Bell owned the magazine, Mrs. Bell was not only its fashion editor but the owner of a Bloomsbury shop called “Magazin de Modes” that supplied the fashions, fabric, and accessories presented in La Belle Assemblée. The magazine was sold in 1821 but Mrs. Bell resurfaced about three years later as the fashion editor of The World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons (1824-1851), which at that time was also owned and published by John Bell. At this point her shop had moved to St. James and still offered the French fashions that were featured in The World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons. While it is unfortunate that these publications were also used as vehicles to promote a dress shop, they are no less an important record of the fashions of the era. After Mrs. Bell’s departure from La Belle Assemblée, the magazine devoted more coverage to the wardrobes of various members of the aristocracy as well as current Paris fashion with no recorded commercial tie-in.

[[{"fid":"274503","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"The World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons (1838)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"The World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons (1838)"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"The World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons (1838)","title":"The World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons (1838)","height":"380","width":"600","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]

[[{"fid":"274508","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Ladies Monthly Magazine (1850s)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Ladies Monthly Magazine (1850s)"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Ladies Monthly Magazine (1850s)","title":"Ladies Monthly Magazine (1850s)","height":"200","width":"143","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]][[{"fid":"274509","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Ladies Monthly Magazine (1867)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Ladies Monthly Magazine (1867)"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Ladies Monthly Magazine (1867)","title":"Ladies Monthly Magazine (1867)","height":"200","width":"166","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]The World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons (London: Mr. Bell) was a monthly magazine that was published from 1824-1851. It was principally a fashion magazine with an abundance of hand-colored steel engravings of ladies’ fashions though it also featured articles on literature, music, fine arts and “gossip and the gaieties of High Life”.  In 1852 it merged with The Ladies’ Monthly Magazine and from 1852-1879 it was known as Ladies’ Monthly Magazine, the World of Fashion, Journal of Fashion, Literature, Music, the Opera, and the Theatres.  This configuration was heavily illustrated with elaborate high quality colored plates in rich, jewel-like colors with multiple figures wearing the latest fashion. It also occasionally featured full-size dress patterns. As in The World of Fashion, this publication offered fine arts, opera, and theater reviews, serialized romantic fiction (i.e. “The Master of Hearts”, “The Emperor and the Dancing Master”), and a regular column on the doings of the aristocracy and the Royal Family. “The Court and High Life” and “History of the Peerage” (profiling a different peer each month!) were regular features. Both incarnations of the publications are known for the quality of their plates which set a high standard in fashion periodicals of the time.

[[{"fid":"274510","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Ladies Pocket: Hair","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Ladies Pocket: Hair"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Ladies Pocket: Hair","title":"Ladies Pocket: Hair","height":"200","width":"120","class":"media-element file-default"}}]][[{"fid":"274511","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Ladies Pocket: yellow hat","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Ladies Pocket: yellow hat"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Ladies Pocket: yellow hat","title":"Ladies Pocket: yellow hat","height":"200","width":"150","class":"media-element file-default"}}]][[{"fid":"274512","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Ladies Pocket: Promenade","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Ladies Pocket: Promenade"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Ladies Pocket: Promenade","title":"Ladies Pocket: Promenade","height":"200","width":"112","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]

[[{"fid":"274513","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Le Vicomte D’Arlincourt","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Le Vicomte D’Arlincourt"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Le Vicomte D’Arlincourt","title":"Le Vicomte D’Arlincourt","height":"200","width":"169","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]The Ladies Pocket Magazine. Jan. 1824-1840 monthly (London: J. Robins & Co.). Obviously a smaller format compared to other ladies magazines, the early issues featured engravings of prominent men of the day facing the title page not unlike pinups. Volume one had an engraving of Lord Byron; another issue had Le Vicomte D’Arlincourt, and another Sir Walter Scott. Besides fashions of the day and gossip, there was an assortment of fiction, poetry and articles such as “Paoli, the Corsican Patriot”, “The Science of Gloveology” and “The Duties of Married Females” which offered this advice:  “The greatest felicity we can desire in this life is contentment. If we aim at anything higher we shall be greatly disappointed. A wife must endeavor to attain this essential virtue.” The fashion plates are hand colored and sometimes busy pieces with multiple dresses, hairstyles and hats on the same plate. At other times a full plate was devoted to hats or hairstyles with elaborate, often bizarre, ornamentation. The literary content of this magazine has been described as better than its fashion content by some though that was not my experience.

[[{"fid":"274514","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions","title":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions","height":"200","width":"103","class":"media-element file-default"}}]][[{"fid":"274515","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions (1828)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions (1828)"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions (1828)","title":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions (1828)","height":"200","width":"264","class":"media-element file-default"}}]][[{"fid":"274517","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions","title":"Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions","height":"200","width":"152","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]

There were also publications devoted to men’s dress. Gentlemen’s general interest magazines had been around since 1731 when The Gentleman’s Magazine was first published in London. However it was during the 19th century that men’s magazines with fashion plates were introduced.

Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashions, Fancy Costumes, and the Regimentals of the Army, Splendidly Embellished 1828-1894. (London: Mr. Bell) This gentlemen’s magazine was also the product of Mr. Bell and listed the same address across from St. James Palace as the World of Fashion. The title page informs the reader that “The Fashions are by English, German, and French tailors of the first eminence”.  There were also articles on theater and actors, poetry, gentlemen’s fashion observations, deportment, uniforms, and sport.  “As a passport to good society, dress is equally necessary with address.” Other advice for a gentleman included “…his tailor is quite as necessary an ally as even his schoolmaster.” “Pupil of Fashion stand up!”  Indeed. It featured not only designs for all sorts of day and night wear (including fancy-dress costumes) but designs for “Regimentals” – uniforms for Army officers. Also covered were “Sports and Sportsmen” a regular column which noted that “Those Sports – which whilst they contribute to the health, activity, good humor and manliness of Englishmen…are…ardently followed by gentlemen.”

Also of interest:  The Gentleman’s Pocket Magazine and Album of literature and fine arts. (1827-1832. London)

[[{"fid":"274518","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Godey's Lady's Book","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Godey's Lady's Book"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Godey's Lady's Book","title":"Godey's Lady's Book","height":"200","width":"306","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]][[{"fid":"274519","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Godey's (1850)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Godey's (1850)"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Godey's (1850)","title":"Godey's (1850)","height":"200","width":"135","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]Across the pond there were a number of important women’s fashion plate magazines as well. The most successful and probably best remembered today, was Godey’s Lady’s Book published in Philadelphia from 1830-1898 by Louis A. Godey (there is no record of a wife owning a dress shop). Besides fashion it published a significant number of important American writers such as Nathanial Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe and also many women such as Harriet Beecher Stowe. Its fashion pages usually included a pattern each month along with sheet music, short stories, history, poetry, recipes and remedies.  It is more text focused than many fashion magazines of the time. There are a number of online resources available for this publication which are accessible through its NYPL Catalog entries.

[[{"fid":"274520","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Monitor of Fashion (1854)","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Monitor of Fashion (1854): outdoor gossip"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Monitor of Fashion (1854)","title":"Monitor of Fashion (1854): outdoor gossip","height":"200","width":"149","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]The Monitor of Fashion (1853-1854) was the New York based version of Moniteur de la Mode, an important French fashion periodical. It was published by Genio C. Scott at 130 Broadway and featured “Numerous Engravings in the First Style of the Art”. An annual subscription cost three dollars. The [[{"fid":"274521","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Monitor of Fashion","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Monitor of Fashion: French dress pattern on tissue"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Monitor of Fashion","title":"Monitor of Fashion: French dress pattern on tissue","height":"150","width":"214","style":"float:right","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]text was in English though the plates were created in Paris as were the full size dress patterns on tissue that were bound into each issue. Gossip from Paris (“Lent has been very dull this year…”) appeared along with the fashion reporting, as did a regular column called “Gems of Thought” which offered items like “Graves are the footprints of the angel of eternal life” to ponder. Perhaps it sounds better in French.

Other American fashion plate periodicals include:

[[{"fid":"274522","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Mme Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Mme Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Mme Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions","title":"Mme Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions","height":"218","width":"600","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]

Mme Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions. (1860-1863. New York). This publication was the creation of milliner, abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Ellen Louise Demorest and her husband William Jennings Demorest, a well-to-do merchant. They ran a successful business in New York City publishing patterns and used the Mirror of Fashions as a catalog of their patterns for women and children. The black and white magazine also featured songs and music, poetry, short stories, non-fiction, and advertising for everything from French corsets and hoop skirts to pianos, organs and clothes wringers.

[[{"fid":"274524","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Mme Demorest","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Mme Demorest: dinner dress"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Mme Demorest","title":"Mme Demorest: dinner dress","height":"200","width":"185","class":"media-element file-default"}}]][[{"fid":"274526","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Mme Demorest","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Mme Demorest: childs yoke dress"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Mme Demorest","title":"Mme Demorest: childs yoke dress","height":"200","width":"166","class":"media-element file-default"}}]][[{"fid":"274527","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Mme Demorest","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Mme Demorest: Young America (Spring Suit)"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Mme Demorest","title":"Mme Demorest: Young America (Spring Suit)","height":"200","width":"103","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]

Also worth a look: Ladies Literary Magazine or Weekly Repository. Philadelphia: HC Lewis 1817-1818. Available online and in the Art & Architecture Collection.

[[{"fid":"274528","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst: couple strolling"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Magasin for Konst","title":"Magasin for Konst: couple strolling","height":"355","width":"200","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]Although for most people Sweden isn’t the first place that comes [[{"fid":"274529","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Magasin for Konst","title":"Magasin for Konst","height":"167","width":"100","style":"float:right","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]to mind when thinking of 19th century fashion publications, the Art & Architecture Collection’s copies of the Swedish Magasin för Konst, Nyheter och Moder [Magazine for Art, News and Fashion]. (Monthly 1823-1844. Stockholm: Tryckt hos Carl Deleen) are an illuminating experience. The 21volumes in the Art & Architecture Collection are one of only five complete sets in the United States and the only complete set in New York. The Magasin is considered a Swedish cultural icon and an important forerunner to later periodicals. It is probably most analogous to the English publication The Repository as regards the calibre [[{"fid":"274530","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst: dress"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Magasin for Konst","title":"Magasin for Konst: dress","height":"160","width":"100","style":"float:right","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]of writing and art, and the diversity of subject matter. It featured not only high quality hand-colored fashion plates but designs for playing cards (usually bawdy), rebuses, politically focused satirical pieces, music and lyrics, short stories, humor pieces, travel and history pieces (which often focused on graves), music and theater reviews, cultural items, biographies, Paris fashion news, embroidery patterns - some with hand colored swatches, and furniture and décor all accompanied by hand-colored plates, black and white engravings, and aquatints, often presented as fold out illustrations. The art work is of uniformly high quality. An interesting feature of the fashion illustrations is that they regularly[[{"fid":"274532","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst: grave"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Magasin for Konst","title":"Magasin for Konst: grave","height":"124","width":"100","style":"float:right","class":"media-element file-default"}}]] featured men and women together at a time when most magazines featured men and women separately.  [[{"fid":"274531","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst: cards"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Magasin for Konst","title":"Magasin for Konst: cards","height":"295","width":"200","style":"float:left","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]

[Thank you Kathie Coblentz for all of your help with translations!]

Those are just a few of the many fashion-plate periodicals from the 19th century available in the Art and Architecture Reading Room of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. There are also plate-only volumes available in addition [[{"fid":"274533","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Magasin for Konst: plate 15"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Magasin for Konst","title":"Magasin for Konst: plate 15","height":"120","width":"100","style":"float:right","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]to the bound copies of complete issues. For any questions or queries please email us at art@nypl.org. Many of these periodicals are available in digital format online. Please refer to the NYPL Catalog entries for links to web sites such as the Hathi Trust and others.

Adburgham, A. (1972) Women in print: writing women and women's magazines from the Restoration to the accession of Victoria. London: Allen and Unwin, 1972.  JFE 03-354

Adburgham, A. (1983). Silver fork society: Fashionable life and literature from 1814 to 1840. London: Constable.  JFD 84-1442

Chondra, J.,ed. (2008). The Greenwood encyclopedia of clothing through world history. (Volume 3: 1801 to the present). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. *R-ART GT507 .G74 2008

“History of publishing”. (2014) Encyclopaedia Britannica online.

The new Locations section of nypl.org is built with AngularJS, a JavaScript framework in which testing is integrated into the application development process. As the project involved large data sets (92 NYPL locations, each with their own events, exhibitions, and blogs), we needed to verify the correctness of our code and the overall application. Also, since AngularJS was new to us in the Digital Experience department, we wanted to implement best practices and that included writing tests. Although we've written tests for other JavaScript components, many of the concepts and techniques we encountered were new to us.

Unit tests, which directly test the code, were written. But, to test user interaction we used Protractor, AngularJS's end-to-end (E2E) testing framework. Protractor is a Node.js program that runs tests against the application in a browser and interacts with the page to simulate user interaction. What follows is a brief overview of how we used Protractor to run E2E tests on the Locations application. We wanted to share the testing techniques we learned in AngularJS.

A JavaScript configuration file is needed to run the specs. It's a simple file that tells Protractor the Selenium address, what browser to run the tests on, the spec files, and other tools we want to use before or during the tests.

After starting a Selenium server, we can run all the tests or select a specific section based on the 'suites' defined in the configuration file. This helped us break down all the E2E tests into smaller components and made it easier to run the tests and read the results.

Writing E2E tests

E2E tests are written using the Jasmine JavaScript testing framework. It is a behavior-driven development framework. It breaks up testing suites with a 'describe' function and tests within that suite with 'it' functions. Assertions and expectations go within the 'it' functions.

A 'describe' function can have optional beforeEach and afterEach functions that run before and after every 'it' function, respectively. The beforeEach is useful to group together tests that run on one page, such as the example above.

Page Objects

Using Page Objects is a pattern used to organize the tests and reuse DOM selectors in multiple tests. In the example above, if we wanted to test the location's name in a different test, the same line of code 'var title = element(by.css('.location-name'));' would be reused. This is troublesome if you have multiple tests checking the '.location-name' class. With Page Objects, we can define all the elements on a page and reuse them throughout different sets of tests.

Testing Bibliocommons Sign-On

One component of the nypl.org Drupal site that we had to port over to AngularJS was the Bibliocommons login button in the header. This component was rewritten as an AngularJS module so it can be used in other AngularJS applications. The module has a service that manages cookies and a directive for the login form and the post-login menu. Protractor can manage browser cookies and we took advantage of setting and getting cookies to mock an NYPL patron logging in and remaining logged in as they navigate through the site.

Testing Google Analytics

For web analytics, we used Google Analytics along with the AngularJS Angularitics plugin. It was easy to set up and configure but we wanted to write tests for page and event tracking. Google Analytics sets up a global 'ga' function which we override before each test, add the tracking events to an array when they are performed, and then verify that the tracking occurred.

To do so in Protractor, the executeScript() function was used to write and execute JavaScript to the browser to override the global 'ga' function. When we visit a different page, we verify that the page view was added to the array we created.

Similarly, event tracking was tested by having Protractor click on buttons or links and then verifying that the click event was logged. All Google Analytics tracking events are logged in the same array structure: ['send', 'event', 'Category title', 'Action title', 'Label'].

Mocking HTTP Requests

E2E tests are useful for verifying that the complete app works as intended, from the front-end to the API. After many discussions, we decided to also mock the API responses for some E2E tests, with the option to disable the mocked data with the real API data response.

In order to do so, we used browser.addMockModule(...) to create an AngularJS module to intercept the HTTP request with help from the ngMockE2E mock module. When creating the mock module, the $httpBackend service is available and it can be used to intercept HTTP requests and respond with our mocked data, while allowing all the other requests to pass through.

The mocked data serves as specification of what the API response should look like. When testing with mocked data, we are ensuring that the front-end is working as intended. When we disable the mocked API response, the E2E tests make sure that the API is returning the data correctly. Having control over the mocked API response also helps when we want to find out what happens to the interface when data is missing from the API. For example, we can remove a library's blog post from the API response and make sure that the intended fallback is working. In this specific example, we would verify that the "BLOGS" section and title on the library's page are not appearing since there are no blogs to display.

Note: Since we are using JSONP when calling the API, we must use the whenJSONP() method of $httpBackend and add '?callback=JSON_CALLBACK' at the end of the call.

The module can be added in the 'it' function for a test. But, since we are mocking the data for multiple tests, it is added in the beforeEach function that executes before every test.

Homepage Tests

The homepage for the new Locations section was the most involved page to test. There are many features and a huge data set to work with.

Geolocation, the browser's ability to get a user's current location, was mocked using the similar technique as the Google Analytics mocking. The geolocation function was mocked and we passed in the coordinates or error code we wanted to test.

This was a brief overview of all the E2E tests written for the Locations section and does not include the other hundreds of tests for the amenity pages, the header and footer elements, the Ask NYPL chat widget, or the autofill search feature on the homepage. Writing reusable components helped us the most to test different modules which ran on multiple pages. Next up we'll discuss unit testing and code coverage.

Newly installed in the Map Division’s exhibition case are three not-so-new maps demonstrating the role that maps play, years after their informative, current-events function, in documenting histories of changing boundaries. Looking back, we can see not only cartographic snapshots of former times but also transformed geopolitics that may hold the seeds of new conflicts—the unintended consequences of treaties that did more than draw new lines and paint different colors on subtly subjective maps.

Here is a preview of the maps that you can come to see in person in the Map Division.

A new and exact map of the dominions of the King of Great Britain on ye continent of North America 1715 [with changes to 1731], Herman Moll’s map, not only illustrates industrious beavers but also reflects provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. Boundaries and notes indicate new agreements about waters and lands accessible to the French in this bountiful fishing area.

John Disturnell’s Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Mejico, 1848, is the 14th edition, in Spanish, of a series of maps chronicling battles that led to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which established a new U.S.-Mexico border. (This image, of an 1847 edition of the map, is shown courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division because NYPL’s 1848 edition in our exhibition has not yet been digitized.)

The Rand McNally Map of New Europe, 1919, with “Summary of the Treaty of Peace,” focuses on the newly formed European countries resulting from the Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye that followed World War I. (This image is shown courtesy of Toronto Public Library because NYPL’s copy in our exhibition has not yet been digitized.)

Beyond content, these three maps, produced in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries respectively, provide an easily viewed progression of changing styles of cartography, from the decorative to the unadorned.

For further reading on these maps and mapmakers and their historical context, here are a few places to start:

• The Cartographer and the Literati: Herman Moll and his Intellectual Circle, by Dennis Reinhartz, 1997
• “John Disturnell’s Map of the United Mexican States,” by Lawrence Martin, in A La Carte, compiled by Walter W. Ristow, 1972
• Mapping the First World War by Peter Chasseaud, 2013.

Since the Map Division was restored and renovated as The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division in 2005, a new, permanent exhibition case has been anchored along the north wall of the reading room for displays such as the one described above. This enables the staff, with the help of the library’s able conservators and exhibition installers, to show off examples of the library’s cartographic treasures that shed light, as primary resources, on their makers’ views of the world in their own time. These small exhibitions change every few months. They are well worth a look, not only for the maps themselves, but also for the background information included in label text researched by our curator, and for the lovely and (usually!) peaceful ambiance of our restored reading room. We welcome you to stop by in the Map Division, Room 117 of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, to see them.

In years past (until the early 1980s), the Map Division staff would display maps in a small, temporary exhibition case in the hallway outside the reading room, along with a few framed maps hung on the wall above the case. But the “blockbuster” exhibitions have been those in the library’s larger, dedicated spaces, where maps have played a starring as well as supporting role. One can still get a taste of some of those past, library-wide exhibitions through associated publications and online versions. Connect to this Research Guide list for links to NYPL exhibitions of the past that have featured significant cartographic content.

If you open up your word processing software and start typing, chances are you’re looking at Times New Roman. It’s so ubiquitous that we take it for granted, but just like Spider-Man or Wolverine, this super-typeface has its own origin story.

You might be surprised to learn that Times New Roman began as a challenge, when esteemed type designer Stanley Morison criticized London’s newspaper The Times for being out-of-touch with modern typographical trends. So The Times asked him to create something better. Morison enlisted the help of draftsman Victor Lardent and began conceptualizing a new typeface with two goals in mind: efficiency—maximizing the amount of type that would fit on a line and thus on a page—and readability. Morison wanted any printing in his typeface to be economical, a necessity in the newspaper business, but he also wanted the process of reading to be easy on the eye.

Morison looked to classical type designs for inspiration. He liked the look of the modern typeface Plantin, which was based off the older typeface Gros Cicero, designed by Robert Granjon. The “cicero” in Gros Cicero was a contemporary term for the size of the type—today, we would describe cicero’s size as 11.5-point—and the “gros” referred to the proportions of the letters. The Rare Book Division has an example of Gros Cicero in Surius’ Commentarivs Brevis Rervm In Orbe Gestarvm, printed in 1574.

To achieve efficiency, Morison raised what is called the “x-height” of the letters. This is the distance between the top and bottom of a lower-case letter without ascending or descending parts, like a, c, or m. This is easier to illustrate than describe, so check out this handy diagram:

He also reduced the “tracking,” or spacing between each letter, to make a more condensed typeface. As you might imagine, moving letters closer together could also make them harder to read. To protect his second goal of readability, Morison had to alter the shape of the letterforms. The thicker portions of each letter—for example, the vertical lines of the “n” above—were widened, so that the letters held more ink and appeared darker when printed, which contrasted more clearly against the paper. The intersections of these thicker strokes were thinned; for example, where the vertical lines of the “n” meet its serifs. This kept the shape of the letters from becoming muddled and also gave them a rounder, more legible look. All of these differences can be clearly seen in a comparison of the old typeface with Morison and Lardent’s new creation, which The Timespublished in a pamphlet around the time of the change.

The Times tested its type thoroughly. In 1926, the British Medical Research Council had published a Report on the Legibility of Print, and the new typeface followed its recommendations. Before final approval, test pages were also submitted to a “distinguished ophthalmic authority,” (Morison, vol. 21, no. 247, p. 14) leading The Times to announce that its typeface had “the approval of the most eminent medical opinion.” The newspaper recognized that scientific analysis was well and good, but an equally important test was actually reading it. Members of the team practiced reading for long periods of time, under both natural and artificial light. After test upon test and proof upon proof, the final design was approved, and “The Times New Roman” was born.

On October 3, 1932, The Times unveiled its new typeface with great fanfare. “From September 26th to October 3rd,” notes The Monotype Recorder, “all the readers of The Times were reminded, daily, of the importance of type and printing.” It was the first time that a newspaper had designed its own typeface, and The Times owned its exclusive rights for one year. In the following years, American publishers were slow to adopt Times New Roman because in order to look its best, it required an amount of ink and quality of paper that American newspapers were initially unwilling to shell out for. It eventually caught on as a typeface for books and magazines, with its first big American client being Woman’s Home Companion in December 1941. The Chicago Sun-Times began printing with it in 1953.

An interesting footnote to the development of Times New Roman trickles down to us in the present day. The original hardware for the typeface—the “punches” that helped create the molds for casting type—were created jointly by the Monotype Corporation and the Linotype Company, the two main manufacturers of automated typesetting machines and equipment at that time. Both companies subsequently made sets of the type for purchase. Monotype named its type “Times New Roman,” while Linotype used “Times Roman.” Fast forward to the computer era: when selecting “fonts” for their word processing programs, Apple chose to license the Linotype catalog, and Microsoft licensed Monotype’s. That’s why the name of this typeface is slightly different depending on your choice of Mac or PC!

In 1932, The Timesspecifically noted that their new typeface was not intended for books: “It is a newspaper type—and hardly a book type—for it is strictly appointed for use in short lines—i.e., in columns.” They later developed a wider version adapted to fit a book’s longer lines of text. This idea that the use of a typeface affects its form struck me as very relevant to today’s world of e-book publishing and web-based content. Indeed, Times New Roman’s chief competitors these days are Arial and Calibri, two typefaces whose lack of serifs makes them easier to read on a screen, according to many. But at 82 years old, Times New Roman is still going strong and proving that our humblest word processing friends have some pretty historic beginnings.

If you’re taken with typography, then NYPL has a mountain of resources for you. For starters, try Alexander Lawson’s Anatomy of a Typeface, Stanley Morison’s A Tally of Types, or Daniel Updike’s Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use.

“Sphinx” diagram courtesy Wikimedia Commons. All other images: Rare Book Division and General Research Division. New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, Tilden Foundations.

On a beautiful Wednesday morning in 1904, six year old Edna Doering left her apartment in the East Village with her mother, and two elder siblings. Her mother carried a shiny tin lunch box for the picnic the family was going to have at Locust Grove, Long Island, the intended destination of a church-sponsored pleasure cruise aboard the General Slocum steamboat. Soon after the boat set off, it caught fire and ran aground on North Brother Island. Most of the 1,400 passengers women and children died onboard or drowned in the East River. It remained the worst mass fatality in New York City history until September 11th, 2001.

In 1987, journalist Jeff Kisseloff interviewed Doering, then 87 years old, and one of the few remaining survivors of the General Slocum disaster. In her interview, Doering recalls her anticipation for the trip and her childlike disappointment that her panicked mother threw the lunch box overboard during the fire. Doering was the only member of her family to survive that day. She was saved when a stranger aboard the boat threw her overboard. Doering landed, she graphically relayed to Kisseloff, on what she could only assume were floating bodies and was rescued by a passing rowboat that was searching for survivors.

Doering is one of over 150 interviews Kisseloff conducted for his book, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II. Between 1986 to 1988, he traversed the city with a cassette recorder to interview former longshoreman, bootleggers, pickle makers, butchers, community activists, housewives, and writers in an attempt to capture stories of old Manhattan. Most of the people he interviewed were elderly at the time and have since died. Thus, Kisseloff’s recordings provide the only extant story of their lives in and around Manhattan before 1945. These original, unedited interviews have recently been digitized and are now open to the public through the Jeff Kisseloff oral history interviews collection held in the Manuscripts and Archives Division.

The interviews touch on the key topics of late 19th and early 20th century life. During this time period horse drawn carts were almost entirely replaced by motorized vehicles; refrigerators replaced ice boxes; unions were increasingly organized across industrial and public service sectors; alcoholic beverages were outlawed during Prohibition and eventually re-legalized ; and the Great Depression flipped countless lives upside down. New York City’s population growth soared from 1890 to 1920, as immigrants from Europe and Russia made their homes in the swollen tenements throughout the city. As the population grew, residential Manhattan surged northward assisted by the creation of the subway system. Farmland in northern Manhattan was settled by new Irish and German citizens while southern African Americans migrated north to Harlem during what is now called the “Great Migration.”

Kisseloff framed his book according to the city’s neighborhoods; contained in the collection are interviews from a wide range of New York’s urban population. The interviews he conducted in each neighborhood reflect the variety of social, economic, and cultural forces that shaped them. These neighborhoods often contained diametrically opposed economic classes as well as multiple ethnic and religious groups, all coexisting only a few blocks from one another. For example, on the Upper West Side he interviewed the influential newspaper editor William Randolph Hearst who lived in a private building his family owned on 86th Street; Olga Marx, an upper class German Jewish woman who grew up in her family’s brownstone on 77th Street; Rosanna Weston, a lifelong resident in the predominately African American San Juan Hill area (most of which was razed to build Lincoln Center); and Bullets Bressan, the son of an Italian tile setter, who lived in a four room apartment on 69th Street and the Hudson River with his parents and five siblings. While these four individuals lived within walking distance, their respective experiences were worlds apart.

Despite ethnic and class differences, common threads carry across interviews from the same neighborhood, or region of Manhattan. The East Side interviews discuss the massive gashouses that lined the East River, and the Chelsea interviews consistently mention union bosses Joe Ryan and John Lovejoy Elliott, who founded the Hudson Guild. The East Harlem interviews tend to focus on boxing, cigar making, and the neighborhood’s pride in Congressman and native son Vito Marcantonio.The Harlem interviews vivify the Harlem Renaissance and outstanding neighborhood figures such as Marcus Garvey and Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. Interviewees from the Lower East Side recall their fear of the mafia and Chinatown gangs; the unionization of the garment industries, particularly the creation of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America; and their involvement with community groups and landsmanshafts, immigrant benevolent organizations with ties to a particular region. Discussed in many of the interviewees who lived along the west side of Manhattan are the effect of the Hudson River Railroad lines and the river itself on the neighborhoods, and memories of the 10th Avenue cowboys, mounted men who road in front of the trains wielding flags to warn pedestrians of the approaching locomotive.

Present in all interviews are personal details of apartments and houses , and the minutiae of everyday life. Food and eating habits are often discussed. Kisseloff interviewed Stanley Auster of the famous Auster family who owned candy stores in the Lower East Side and the East Village. While Auster does not give away his families secret egg cream recipe, he explains how the candy shops and drinking egg creams provided a neighborhood gathering spot and activity during Prohibition. Sol Kaplan discusses making pickles on Allen Street and Joe Hinzman recalls working at Ruppert’s Brewery in Yorkville. There are also memories of home cooked meals, ranging from humble lunches of herrings and potatoes to the multicourse formal dinners of Fifth Avenue resident Frederick Vanderbilt Field. Also discussed is sexuality and human relationships. Interviewees recollect when they courted and married their husbands or wives. There are sweet stories, like a couple who met across a fire escape, as well as more salty tales of going “two button,” slang that references the two buttons that held a girl’s knickers together. Many interviewees who grew up in tenements remembered spending Saturday afternoons at the movies, for their own entertainment and to give their parents rare moments of privacy.

Researchers are encouraged to read You Must Remember This, peruse the finding aid, and make an appointment to come in and spend some time with these remarkable and engaging interviews. Any researcher whose project touches on late 19th or early 20th century life in New York City, or indeed the United States, will find at least one interview that will enrich their research.

December 17 marks British author, editor, and all-around literary icon Ford Madox Ford’s 141st birthday. To celebrate the occasion, I explored his writings in the Rare Book Division—and found some fascinating glimpses into his life and work.

Today, Ford is best known for The Good Soldier and his World War I tetralogy Parade’s End. (To learn more about the war and its reception in America, be sure to check out NYPL’s current exhibition Over Here: World War I and the Fight for the American Mind!) But the author was extremely prolific, writing books, editing literary journals the English Review and the transatlantic review, and mentoring younger artists such as Ernest Hemingway. Readers of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises might recognize Ford as the inspiration for the not-altogether-complimentary character of Henry Braddocks. He began writing as Ford Madox Hueffer, but in 1919 changed his surname to Ford.

His earliest work in our collection is a children’s book, The Queen Who Flew, a Fairy Tale, written when Ford was twenty-one. Decorating the frontispiece is an illustration by celebrated Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones was a contemporary of Ford’s grandfather and namesake, the painter Ford Madox Brown.

While still a young writer, Ford began a professional collaboration with none other than Joseph Conrad. Neither artist had yet reached the height of his literary accomplishment — Ford had years before Parade’s End, and Conrad was still conceptualizing Lord Jim. The collaboration was ultimately contentious, both for the authors and for later critics trying to pin down exactly who contributed what to each book. But before it fell apart, Ford and Conrad co-authored three novels, and we have the first two in our collection: The Inheritors and Romance.

The great thing about this copy of The Inheritors is its publishers' cloth binding. This is a term for the ready-made covers manufactured in bulk by publishers for entire editions of a book—previously, owners would buy their books unbound and then pay for custom, one-of-a-kind bindings. The Inheritors was published in 1901 when publishers' cloth bindings were at a design high-point, and before they were gradually replaced by dust jackets. You can see the multiple colors, commercial illustration, and gilding that makes this binding both beautiful and modern. I can picture it looking right at home on a bookstore shelf today.

Romance’s binding is more restrained, but its real gem lies within the covers: its flyleaf bears the signatures of both Ford and Conrad. And while Ford’s inscription is a simple “with affection,” Conrad takes the opportunity to hash out exactly what he added to the novel:

“In this book I have done my share of writing. Most of the characters (with the exception of Mrs. Williams, Sebright and the seaman) were introduced by Hueffer and developed then in my own way with, of course, his consent and collaboration. The last part is (like the first) the work of Hueffer except a few pars [paragraphs] written by me. Part second is actually joint work. Parts 3 & 4 are my writing with here and there a sentence by Hueffer.”

In addition to being a novelist, Ford was also a published poet and essayist. These two aspects of his creative output are represented in our Division by From Inland, and Other Poems and New York Essays. In the latter, written between October 1926 and March 1927, Ford expounds on contemporary authors, food, and his travels in New York City. He meets a women en route to catching rattlesnakes for the Bronx Park Zoo and recounts a harrowing and surreal trip to Coney Island that ends with Ford in a ballroom, empty except for a man slowly turning in circles and firing a six-shooter with each hand. Despite, or because of, these adventures, Ford was taken with the city, calling it “my beloved Gotham” and ending his first essay with these words:

“Well, one hears eternally that New York is not America; it obviously is not Europe [...] Perhaps, the one here overlapping the other, it is really the beginning of the World.”

Wherever you are in the world, I hope you’ll join me in wishing Mr. Ford Madox Ford a happy birthday and flipping (or clicking) open one of his books to celebrate!

Image Credits: Rare Book Division. New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, Tilden Foundations.

Christmas approaches, and at this time of year many of us will read, listen to, or watch adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. This story, now canonical, has in fact been immensely popular and influential since the very first day it appeared. That first edition, released on December 19, 1843, sold out almost immediately; its publisher returned to press no fewer than eight times within the first six months. Scholar-bibliographer Ruth Glancy has traced how this tale, “a truly popular work which is undeniably a masterpiece as well,” has both charmed and confounded readers and scholars ever since.

Some examples of this ghostly tale’s influence and staying power:

A Christmas Carolled a nineteenth-century Boston factory owner to give his workers a day off from work as well as free turkeys. The tale inspired the creation of a welfare campaign to provide “Tiny Tim” cots to children in need. It’s the story that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt read to his family each winter. And in England, Princess Maud read it to her family annually, during the reign of King Edward VII. A Christmas Carol continues, year after year, to be reworked, adapted, dramatized, enjoyed at home, and read in public settings. Perhaps you were lucky enough to have attended WYNC and WQXR’s dramatic performance of it just last week!

While most of us know our way around A  Christmas Carol by now, perhaps less familiar are the dozens of Christmas stories (all part of the George Arents Collection) that Charles Dickens penned in the twenty-five years that followed its publication. After A Christmas Carol came four more Christmas books:

The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (Christmas 1844)

This strange tale revolves around a wedding, an orphan, an evil rich man, and some frightening goblins. Or was it all a dream, resulting from our protagonist Trotty Veck having had too much tripe at dinner?

The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home (Christmas 1845)

Almost as popular as A Christmas Carol in its time, this tale includes a mysterious man in disguise, a dog named Boxer, some possible infidelity, a young blind heroine, a nanny, and—of course—a cricket.

The Battle of Life: A Love Story (Christmas 1846)

Perhaps only Dickens could offer up a happy ending to this troubling tale of a missing sister and a sinister elopement scheme, all set on a one-time battlefield that still bears the relics of a host of dead men and horses.

The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas-Time (Christmas 1848)

In this tale, a gloomy chemistry professor says things like, “Another Christmas come, another year gone. . . More figures in the lengthening sum of recollection that we work and work at to our torment, till Death idly jumbles all together, and rubs all out.” But when his wish to forget his distressing past is granted, he gets more than he bargained for.

​Following on the heels of these five standalone books, Dickens took a new approach to holiday storytelling. He began to write and edit special Christmas-themed issues of Household Words, a twopenny journal he launched in 1850. For each “Christmas number” of Household Words, Dickens collaborated with other prominent writers, including Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell. Through these tales, Dickens as author and editor continued to explore themes we still associate with Christmas storytelling: the comfort of memory, the role of traditions and rituals, the invaluable presence of family and friends, and the power of generosity and goodwill.

To learn all about the history of A Christmas Carol as well as all Dickens’s many other Christmas stories, you can do no better than to start by consulting Ruth Glancy’s Dickens's Christmas Books, Christmas Stories, and Other Short Fiction : an Annotated Bibliography. She points curious readers to the locations of primary sources and various editions as well as to translations; abridgements; stage, film, radio, and musical  adaptations; reviews; commentaries; and scholarly studies. And to learn more about Dickens’s life, including how he just might be to blame for our obsession with having a snowy Christmas day, you can read The Man Who Invented Christmas.

Do you have a favorite Christmas story that you return to again and again? If you would like to find a new Christmas story to read and share with your friends and family, there are hundreds and hundreds of Christmas-themed stories waiting for you at the Library. As for myself, Dickens is great, but I like to read Nancy Mitford's Christmas Pudding this time each year. Happy holiday reading—and if you are so inclined, enjoy a bit of smoking bishop just like Ebenezer Scrooge and Bob Cratchit do in the happy conclusion of A Christmas Carol!  

Evergreens, pines, conifers. As the year draws to a close, many of us have welcomed these needly trees into our homes as part of long-established Christmas tradition. But before this tradition took root in England (via Germany), one Englishman devoted his life all throughout the year to the genus Pinus. That man was Aylmer Bourke Lambert.

Lambert was a voracious collector of books on botany as well as a gatherer of plants, and his herbarium (a collection of preserved plants) eventually grew to include more than 50,000 specimens from the world's forests. He was a founding member of the Linnean Society of London and was elected to the Royal Society as well, and he was known in the scientific community for his generosity in encouraging fellow botanists to draw on specimens from his collections while compiling their own scholarly publications. He also was a famous conifer expert.

The 1837 edition of his book A Description of the Genus Pinus held in the Library’s Rare Book Division stretches to three volumes, each over two feet tall. This work was Lambert’s monumental attempt to document, describe, and illustrate every species of pine known to him from around the world. One particular pine in the book, the sugar pine, was named Pinus Lambertiana in his honor. The sugar pine, largest of the conifers and also known as the most princely of pines for its immense size, was discovered by famed Scottish botanist and Pacific Northwest explorer David Douglas (of Douglas Fir fame).

The Library has digitized each of the handcolored engravings in this edition, and you can view them all in the Library’s Digital Collections. So, if you have found yourself stringing lights and threading cranberries onto thread to adorn an evergreen in your home this year, remember the botanists and collectors like Aylmer Lambert, who helped us to get to know these gymnosperms better!

Francis Frith, The North Shore of the Dead Sea,
printed in The Queen's Bible (1862-63)Francis Frith, The Pool of Hezekiah, Jerusalem, printed in The Queen's Bible (1862-63)

Between 1856 and 1860, the Englishman Francis Frith (1822-98) took three trips to the Middle East to take photographs. The region’s dry heat made the laborious collodion process, where glass plate negatives had to be sensitized, exposed, and developed while still wet (hence its more common name, “wet plate”), exceedingly difficult. Despite this challenge, Frith managed to build up an archive of landscape views that played a central role in establishing his career as England’s most commercially successful photographer of the nineteenth century.

Frith quickly learned that Victorians were eager to own copies of his photographs of the Holy Land. To meet popular demand, he opened his own publishing house, F. Frith & Co., in the late 1850s. Frith made his photographs available in various formats that suited different budgets, from inexpensive stereographs to multi-volume books illustrated with tipped-in albumen prints. Selections from the Middle Eastern photographs illustrated slightly differing books such as Egypt and Ethiopia, Photographed and Described by Francis Frith (1858-59), Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia (1862) and Sinai and Palestine (1862). All of these books are currently on view in the Library’s exhibition, Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography, alongside scenic views of European locations by Frith’s company.

The Queen's Bible (1862-63), front coverThe Queen's Bible (1862-63), title page, Vol. II

Also on display is the Photography Collection’s rare copy of The Queen’s Bible (1862-63), one of the most deluxe publications illustrated with Frith’s photographs. Only 170 copies were produced of this sumptuous volume bound in red Moroccan leather, embossed with royal insignia, and enclosed with ornate brass clasps. Frith dedicated the two-volume Bible including the Old and New Testaments to Queen Victoria, who remained in mourning after the recent death of her beloved husband Prince Albert. The royal couple had been enthusiastic supporters of photography in England from the beginning; in 1853, they became founding patrons of the Photographic Society Club (an early album of which is also on view in the exhibition.) As a contributor to the British journal Photographic Notes wrote in 1862: “Amidst the universal grief felt at the death of the Prince, photographers have their own peculiar additional regret, that their art has lost one of its warmest admirers and patrons.” Although The Queen’s Bible certainly aimed at the high, even royal, end of the market, it comes from a moment when English photography was becoming less of an elite pastime thanks to a burgeoning network of communities, clubs, and publications exchanging ideas about the medium. If the Bible housed Frith’s photographs in religious gravitas, the inexpensive stereograph offered a different kind of experiential richness in its three-dimensional image of distant lands.

This Bible and other books and photographs by Frith are on view in Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography (December 12, 2014-September 5, 2015), in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building’s Gottesman Exhibition Hall.

Further reading

Bartram, Michael. The Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985.

Nickel, Douglas R. Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A Victorian Photographer Abroad. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Nir, Yeshayahu. The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land, 1839-1899. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

Prodger, Phillip. Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Seiberling, Grace. Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

All items pictured can be found in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs and the images are copyright of New York Public Library.

I was invited to the National Library of Colombia’s 2^nd Digital Book Week as a speaker and to give a workshop on digital mapping tools. I thought it would be useful to share that workshop since it encompasses a lot of different processes and tools that make digital cartography today very accessible. It is a primer on working with various free web mapping tools so you can make your own awesome maps.

TL;DR

You will make this. This tutorial assumes you have a digitized map and some data you want to overlay on it. The general steps covered are:

1. geo-referencing the scanned map so that web tiles can be generated
2. generating GeoJSON data to be overlaid
3. creating a custom base map (to serve as reference/present day)
4. integrating all assets in an interactive web page

Note: This tutorial assumes you are using Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari or Google Chrome. You will be playing with the developer console and I don’t have multi-browser instructions.

Let’s get started!

This is what we want to make. It is an 1891 map of Bogotá available in the National Library of Colombia (link requires Flash Player) annotated with some data found in an 1888 Bogotá City Directory.

1) Geo-referencing

The first step after scanning a map is to add geographical data to it; to establish an equivalence between its pixels and the geographic location they represent. This is called geo-referencing. This process will distort the scanned image:

Original scan (shrunk, of course)

…to match the Mercator projection which is used in most web mapping projects such as OpenStreetMap or Google Maps:

Geo-referenced scan in Mercator projection

The amount of distortion will depend on the quality of the survey, preservation state and original projection of the map. You may be asking: how did this magically happen? There’s commercial and open-source software that allows you to geo-reference images but the point of this tutorial is doing all of this without installing any software other than your web browser. Enter: The Map Warper! Map Warper is a web tool that lets you upload your scanned maps and provides a simple interface for you to geo-reference them (or “rectify” in geo parlance). Referencing boils down to you telling what part of the scanned map (left) corresponds to what part of the Mercator projection (right):

The split-view rectification interface in Map Warper

Notice the pins in the image. Each pin has a number and the same pin is present in both views. From them you can tell that North in the scan is pointing leftwards while East is pointing upwards. The more pins you add, the more precise the referencing will be but the slower the final image generation. However, image generation happens only once so I wouldn’t worry too much about that. It’s more an issue of how many pins you are willing to add. The map in this tutorial has 101 pins.

A final consideration in this process is to make sure you get a high-quality geo-referenced image after distortion. The process of distorting the original image is called resampling¹. In the Map Warper’s Advanced options you can set the method from the low-quality but fast Nearest Neighbour to high-quality but slow Cubic Spline:

Select “Cubic Spline” in the Resampling Method option

You can view the final map here. You can also download high-resolution assets in the Export tab. However, I think the main perk you get from the Map Warper are the tiles. It’s that URL template you see here:

You can find the tile URL in the “Export” tab

The template is:

http://mapwarper.net/maps/tile/4949/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

You will need this URL! Keep it somewhere safe. Map Warper has a tile-generating engine that uses the geo-referenced image to produce square map tiles at different zoom levels and coordinates so that only the necessary parts of the interactive map get displayed as you use it². This is an example tile:

Web maps are made up of millions of these

2) Data extraction

We have the map. Now we want to figure out what data to show on it. Our example uses this 1888 City Directory of Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city. This directory is information-rich, containing tens of thousands of person names (each with address and occupation), dozens of different occupations (described in page 4) and advertisements (along with many store addresses and owner names).

The directory provides an interesting view of life in late XIX century Colombia: lawyers, photographers and accountants share pages with saddlers and blacksmiths. I went the boring route and looked for some prominent politicians of the time, such as then-sitting president (page 222, first in the second column). The current list contains seven people: four presidents, a vice-president, a minister and an acting president³. The list includes:

• name
• office (highest office held in the Colombian executive branch)
• term
• page (where it appears in the directory)
• occupation (as displayed in the directory)
• address
• Wikimedia Commons photo URL
• latitude, longitude (a placeholder set to downtown Bogotá that we will change in this step)

Download the CSV list

You can create your own list from other data you find more interesting or useful. Make sure to include latitude and longitude columns and save it as a comma-separated list.

GeoJSON

So far our data is contained in a comma-separated list, but web mapping tools generally use the GeoJSON standard. GeoJSON is based on JSON which is one of the most popular ways of structuring data in the web. GeoJSON uses the concept of “features” to describe geographic data. Those features can be points (as is our current case) or more complex geometries such as lines, multilines and polygons. Each feature is described by its geometry (the point, line, polygon itself) accompanied by its properties which is whatever extra data you want to associate with it (in our case, a person’s name, address, photo, etc.). For example⁴:

We need to convert our spreadsheet into a GeoJSON object and then update the placeholder latitude and longitude values to the proper values. We will use the map itself to help us figure out those. We need a tool that lets us generate GeoJSON that we can easily manipulate.

Enter GeoJSON.io! This is “a quick, simple tool for creating, viewing, and sharing maps”. GeoJSON.io has this nifty interface we can use to create the GeoJSON we need.

Go ahead and open GeoJSON.io in a new browser window. you will see the default map at full zoom out. Now we need to do a little hacking. Right-click somewhere on the map and select Inspect Element:

Right-Click → Inspect Element

This opens an advanced developer view that let’s you view and modify the code of the page you are viewing (in this case, the map interface). GeoJSON.io includes a programming interface (API) that lets you control the map being displayed. The core of this site is MapBoxJS, which is itself built on top of Leaflet, an “Open-Source JavaScript Library for Mobile-Friendly Interactive Maps”. I mention both because, for the most part, whatever works on one of them works on the other (do read the documentation before making any decisions!) and I will be referring to it as Leaflet instead of MapBoxJS.

In the Console tab you’ll see some text and, at the bottom, a cursor where you can execute JavaScript code. You’ll see some comments from the creator of GeoJSON.io and a row where you can type new JavaScript commands. Type this in that area and press ENTER (refer to the animated GIF below):

This will center and zoom the map in Bogotá, Colombia, the area covered by the 1891 map. Now type this:

…and press ENTER. This will add the tile layer itself. Notice that line of code includes the URL you copied in step 1. The end result will look something like this:

A quick “hacking” of GeoJSON.io

You can now close the development window (not the browser window!).

Note: You will need to re-apply this code every time you load GeoJSON.io since it doesn’t save modifications made via console. You can save the data you add to the map by logging in.

Adding data to GeoJSON.io

Now we will use this modified version of the map as a base to properly geo-locate the CSV list of presidents.

Drag the CSV file you downloaded on the map:

Drag and drop magic in GeoJSON.io

You will notice how the data is immediately converted to GeoJSON (right pane) and the map zooms in to show the points that represent each president (left pane). You can see a small green message (top left) showing seven features were imported.

But the 1891 map disappears! No worries. This just means that the map is zoomed in “too close to the ground” and the tile URL template does not have images up to that level. Zoom out a bit and you will see the 1891 map appear again.

Moving the points around

The points in the CSV are all geo-located on top of each other on the same point in Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar. We need to move them to their proper location. If you click the gray pin you will see the additional data for the topmost one (General Rafael Reyes). His address at the time was 50, Calle 16 (50 16th Street). We need to find that address in the map.

Finding the address will be relatively easy since each block has its starting and ending address numbers written on the corners. You will notice that “Carrera” (vertical-ish streets) numbers increase northward with odd numbers east and even numbers west while “Calle” (horizontal-ish streets) numbers increase westward with odd numbers south and even numbers north:

We will place the point in the approximate location between corners in a given block. To do so, activate editing mode by clicking the icon. Pins will have a pink outline and you can move them around. Place the pins in the desired location and click “Save” to commit the changes:

There are some tricky addresses but this task can be quite enjoyable since you literally get lost in 1891 Bogotá. An interesting aspect of this map is that government buildings are colored with the Colombian flag. When you place Rafael Núñez Moledo, the sitting president at the time, you will notice that his address matches one of those flag-colored buildings (the Casa de Nariño).

Saving the GeoJSON

Now we must generate the final GeoJSON that we will use to create our interactive map. Simply select Save > GeoJSON in the editor menu. A file called map.geojson will be generated and downloaded to your computer. You can also just download the one I did, cheater!

3) Creating a 2014 custom map (optional)

We want to be able to compare this 1891 map with present day Bogotá so we can see how things have changed over time. We need a “base map” which is basically what GeoJSON.io has when you load it: a (hopefully accurate) “plain vanilla” street map of the present day world. You could use the standard OpenStreetMap tiles or use a service such as MapBox to produce a completely custom map (MapBox uses OSM data). MapBox is quite powerful: it lets you change colors, customize what gets shown (streets, buildings, parks, etc.) and even use satellite imagery!

I’m not going to describe how to create your own map in MapBox. I will leave that to their excellent tutorial. When you’re done, you will need to write down the Map ID which looks something like username.k53dp4io. You can use the MapBox projects page to see all your maps and easily copy the ID to clipboard:

NOTE: If you don’t want to go through the process of customizing your map, you can use an example MapBox ID later.

4) Final assembly

We now have all the assets required to assemble our interactive map:

• map data in GeoJSON format
• a tile template for the 1891 map
• a tile template or MapBox ID for the 2014 map

We will prototype the interactive map in JSFiddle, a tool that lets you quickly create and test HTML/JavaScript/CSS code. Check out this quick tutorial to familiarize yourself with the interface.

JSFiddle has four main panes:

• HTML code (top left)
• CSS code (top right)
• JavaScript code (bottom left)
• The end result (bottom right)

JSFiddle takes care of assembling the three code components into the result every time you click “Run” (in top, blue bar).

HTML & CSS

In this example the HTML and CSS parts are very simple. We only need a rectangular area in the page that will display the map and all its controls.

We need an HTML element where the map will go. Type or copy/paste this in the HTML pane:

With this code we create a div element whose identifier is map and, as you can imagine, it will contain the map. We now need to “style” the element (give it a width and a height and, if you want to, borders and other attributes). Styling is controlled with CSS. Type or copy/paste this in the CSS pane:

This applies a width and a height of 400 pixels to the element whose identifier is map (the # prefix means “id” in CSS). Of course you can make the rectangle bigger (if your monitor is big enough) and apply other attributes between those { } brackets (e.g.: background-color: #f00; for a red background if you want to see the element with no map) but I just wanted to keep it very simple.

If you click “Run” now you won’t see much (unless you added a background color or a border to the element). That’s all the HTML and CSS you will need for now.

Adding MapBoxJS

To present the map and make it interactive we will need some external assets and JavaScript. I mentioned Leaflet and MapBoxJS before. We are going to need them in order to present and control the map. Leaflet is included in MapBoxJS so we just need to worry about the latter. MapBoxJS is composed of two separate files: a JS file and a CSS file. You already have an idea of what the CSS file does. The JavaScript file contains all the interactive mapping magic. These are the URLs to the files in question (note that it is not the latest MapBoxJS version but no worries, it will work):

CSS file:
http://api.tiles.mapbox.com/mapbox.js/v1.5.0/mapbox.css

JavaScript file:
http://api.tiles.mapbox.com/mapbox.js/v1.5.0/mapbox.js

In the left column in JSFiddle find the “External Resources” section. You need to copy those URLs and paste each in the JavaScript/CSS URI box and click the + button. You will see something like this after you do it:

Your “fiddle” once you add the two MapBoxJS files

This will make JSFiddle load those files the next time you click “Run” and from then on.

Hello map!

Now comes the part we’ve been waiting for! Let’s write some JavaScript so we can see the 1891 map. Write this in the JavaScript pane:

…and click “Run”. This is what you should see:

You first web map!

Thanks to Leaflet, it’s that easy to work with web maps.

Note: I’m not going into details here about the different aspects of the Leaflet or MapBoxJS APIs. They each have their own tutorials and examples. I will instead give some code snippets and superficially explain what they do. You will copy, paste and click “Run” and magic will happen⁵. You will later figure out how to do more awesome things on your own.

Managing multiple tile sets

You may notice that the map is all white except for the 1891 map and that is good. The tile set URL only has the rectified map on it and nothing else. We need to have an additional 2014 tile set to compare (I will use an example MapBox Map ID, in case you did not create your own in step 3 above). We will replace the JS code with new one that will contain:

• some attribution information for the map (useful for when you want to, you know, attribute data in the map)
• the 2014 tile set
• a control that will let us swap one tile set for another

This code should replace your previous JS:

If you look throught this code you will notice it is quite similar to what we had before. The main differences are the addition of attributions and MapBox tile sets (via the map ID). The control itself is two lines: one to create a baseMaps variable that will hold the tile sets (you can add as many tile sets as you want) and another to create the control and add it to the map. Behold the control in action:

Notice how the attribution changes when you toggle the tile sets

We’re almost there! We now need to display our data. Leaflet makes this process quite easy since it natively supports GeoJSON. The process is just a few lines, but first remove the map zoom functionmap.setView([4.598056, -74.075833],14). Now paste this code at the bottom of the JS pane:

You need to copy the GeoJSON output from the text file you downloaded from GeoJSON.io and paste it where you see 'paste_geojson_here_keep_quotes'. Make sure you keep those quotes! That line should end up looking something like:

We replaced the zoom function with map.fitBounds(geolayer.getBounds()). This makes the map “smarter”: instead of us typing longitude, latitude and zoom level by hand we let Leaflet calculate the bounding area for the set of points provided with getBounds() and pass that as a value to the map’s fitBounds() function. Voilá, the map now zooms to show all the points in the set. If you add more points the bounds will change automatically!

You can also add the points and any other data overlay to the layer toggler. You just need to create a variable similar to the one you created for the tile sets and update the control creation code:

You will see something like this when you click “Run”:

Your map with custom data on it

Note: Make sure to move the control creation code L.control.layers to a point below where the GeoJSON is being parsed. The geolayer variable needs to exist for it to be added to the overlays. Refer to my JSFiddle result for details.

Another important line is the one with the L.geoJson() function. This function parses all the features described by the map.geojson. Leaflet/MapBoxJS have default blue pin icons for point features which you can customize if you want. L.geoJson() will also let us add some interaction to the pins. Right now clicking them does nothing.

Making the pins come alive

We want to click on the pins and show a popup box with the data we have associated to it (in the feature’s properties). We need to do two things:

1. a function that will build and present the popup for a given feature (point)
2. modify the L.geoJson() call to use this function

Leaflet’s bindPopup() layer function does just that: draws a box with text next to a given layer. This text can be marked up with HTML. Copy/paste this code below all you have so far:

This showPopup() function receives a feature, the piece of GeoJSON that contains all the information (geometry and properties), and a layer, the same GeoJSON as displayed by Leaflet (in our case, the blue pin). These two parameters are passed automatically by the L.geoJson() function. showPopup() then loops through each property in the feature (name, address, etc.) and builds an HTML string. This string is used as the markup for the popup.

We have not connected showPopup to anything. Modify your current L.geoJson line as follows:

…you are just adding , {onEachFeature: showPopup} after geodata. This tells Leaflet to apply the showPopup function for each feature in the GeoJSON.

Note: If your GeoJSON contains multiple types of features (e.g.: points, lines and polygons) you need to keep in mind the same function will be applied to all of them. For example, polygons have bounds but points do not. You will need to check to see if the feature being clicked has bounds before trying to fitBounds the map.

Running the map and clicking on a pin will result in something like this:

This is nice and all but wouldn’t it be better to actually see the photo and maybe link that page number to the directory itself? Let’s do just that! Replace the showPopup function with this one:

We just added a check in the loop: if key equals “Page” we build a link to the directory and if key equals “Photo” we build an image tag and constrain the height to 150 pixels (just in case the image is too big).

This is how Mr. Núñez looks like now:

…worthy of a president!

And we’re done!

Wrapping it all up

You will want to compile these three code snippets in an HTML page to publish your new map somewhere. Worry not, below is a code snippet that has the requisite spots for you to paste CSS, HTML and JS. Save all the code as a .html file and publish it somewhere:

You can see the finished map here. I made minor modifications to the CSS to fill the browser window.

Hope you found this tutorial useful. Drop me a line if you have any comments or questions!

Family history research often begins with an interview. Speaking with your family to discover names, dates, locations, and important life events is one of the most important steps in delving into the genealogy world.

Key facts that are essential springboards to researching your family history may be held by few (often older) family members. Genealogy researchers frequently express their regret in not pursuing these family details when they had the opportunity. Bits of information requiring intense research may very well be found by asking your family a few questions. Don’t wait until you find yourself saying “if only I had asked Great Aunt Mary...” her mother’s maiden name, or her parents’ ancestral town, or [insert your query here]. Talk to your family now!

Alongside facts, personal narratives are just as important for genealogical and historical research. Stories help to provide personal insight to accompany the names and dates of genealogical research, and help to form a thorough account of someone’s life experiences. Consider your family as “eyewitnesses to history,” whose stories, memories, and traditions are important for both personal and historical contexts (Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage).

Whether you’ve heard family stories countless times, or you’re curious to know more, it is important to sit down with your family and ask questions. You might be surprised by what you find in the process. Different relatives will provide varied bits of (sometimes conflicting) information. All of these pieces are essential in beginning the journey of uncovering your family history.

Interviews can provide you with a personal keepsake, a genealogical research tool, a piece of history, and an opportunity to learn more about your family.

My Experiences

I recently interviewed my grandparents in two respects:

• To learn the facts (names, dates, and locations concerning their family history)
• To record an oral history of their experiences growing up in Brooklyn and the Bronx

Fun facts I learned through this process include my great grandfather winning 2nd place in a city-wide “Most Popular Firefighter” contest, my grandfather witnessing the flag raising at Iwo Jima during his time in the navy, and (possibly exaggerated) stories of scandalous love confessions and acquaintances with the Mafia.

In addition to collecting information for genealogical research, interviewing your family presents an opportunity to better understand their lives. Taking time to speak about significant events, family traditions, and daily activities can be a fun, eye-opening experience. You may find yourself surprised by what you learn.

Where Do I Start?

Who?

Begin by interviewing older family members, but eventually aim to interview all of your relatives. Speak with people from different generations of your family. Stories and details may have been held and passed down by different lines of the family.

Preparation

• Before your interview, consider what you’d like to know. Are you interested in a particular time period/subject, or a full-scale account of your interviewee’s life?
• Conduct background research and plan questions.
• Build rapport with your participant. Describe the nature of the project and some of the topics you’d like to talk about to help put the interviewee at ease. Your relatives can prepare for dates, details, and stories they would like to share.

Logistics

• Schedule the interview for a time and place (either in-person or over the phone) that is most convenient to your relative.
• The interview should take place in a relaxed and comfortable environment (often at the interviewee’s home).
• If you don’t know the relative well, bring someone who is more familiar to him/her. This mutual person may make an introductory phone call on your behalf.

Conversation Tips

• Don’t interrogate your interviewees with details they might not remember, but instead think of the interview as a friendly discussion. Ask questions about names and dates as they arise naturally in conversation.
• Show interest, listen carefully, maintain eye contact, and provide encouragement with nods and smiles—try not to interrupt.
• Doing an activity alongside your relatives (e.g. walking, knitting, cooking) may help them reveal details more easily.

Documenting the Interview

Take notes of important details and questions you may think of while your participant is speaking. You may also like to record the interview using a digital recorder/camera (ask permission!) so you can focus on the discussion rather than writing.

What Questions Do I Ask?

Prepare questions to use as a structural guide for your interview. Background research will help you determine what you want to know, what subjects you’d like to cover, and will help you ask better questions.

Structuring your questions: Questions should be concise and open-ended, allowing the interviewee opportunities to elaborate. Ask follow-up questions and engage in conversation. (e.g. Could you explain? Can you give me an example?)

Start with the basics: Begin with biographical questions (e.g. What is your name? Where were you born? Where did you grow up?)

Genealogy focus: Ask names of family members and important dates (e.g. birth, death, marriage, date of immigration), and locations (e.g. where they lived and worked, native country and town).

Remembering family customs: Ask about family traditions, holiday celebrations, and cultural influences (e.g. my family had an aunt who draped homemade pasta all around her house).

Exploring local history: Ask for descriptions of hometowns, what it was like to grow up in a particular town and how it changed over time. Ask about community traditions and how the area was impacted by historical events.

Expect the unexpected: Don’t worry if the conversation strays from topics on your lists of prepared subjects. Allow interviewees the opportunity to tell their stories and speak freely—they may have experiences of which you were previously unaware. You can always redirect the interview to your original plan if strays too far off course.

Post-interview: Don’t forget to thank your participant. If the interview was recorded, give them a copy and have your participants sign release forms (Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage).

Artifacts

Old photos and documents may help spark memories, prompt questions, and ease your interview into natural conversation. Ask to see your relatives’ old photos when you visit with them and bring photos of people who you'd like to discuss.

Artifacts can include photos, scrapbooks, letters, vital records, immigration documents, family Bibles, and a variety of other heirlooms.

Gathering artifacts can also jump start your family history research. Documents that would have required painstaking effort to locate may suddenly become available at the hand of a family member. In my case, a great aunt sent an 1880 Italian birth certificate (among other genealogical goodies), which provided essential clues and paved a path for future research. Simply asking your family for documents can solve mysteries and save you valuable time.

My interviews with relatives also revealed heaps of photos, a smattering of birth, marriage, and death certificates, wedding invitations, and a letter to the U.S. Navy inquiring about my grandfather, as he apparently did not write home very often during World War II.

Interviewing Guides

The following is a sampling of guides for more interviewing tips and best practices:

• The Smithsonian Folklife and Cultural Heritage: Oral History Interviewing Guide
• The Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center: Oral History Interviews
• FamilySearch: Conducting Family History Interviews
• Family Tree Magazine: Interviewing Articles
• StoryCorps: Great Questions

Also search the library’s Classic Catalog for the following subjects:

• Oral history -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
• Oral history -- Methodology.
• Interviewing -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.

Many beginner genealogy handbooks also provide information on conducting interviews.

NYPL Oral History Projects

The Community Oral History Project documents New York City neighborhood histories through the stories of people’s experiences. Learn about the current projects, how to be an interviewer, and how to share your story. These interviews will be preserved in the Milstein Division, and will be accessible through circulating collections and online.

The NYC Veterans Oral History Project, the Dance Oral History Project, AIDS Oral History Project, and the Louis Armstrong Jazz Oral History Project are among other interviewing projects facilitated by the library.

Before there was a Times Square, the uptown intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue was known as Longacre Square, named after London’s carriage district. Long Acre in London was known for its horse-coach industry, a business that was shared in Manhattan's Longacre Square until nightlife and theaters pushed out the more rustic trade. The city’s density and development worked its way uptown, pushing the theater district into this region in the 1880s and '90s. The Gay '90s saw it flourish, and the hourglass shaped district between 42nd and and 47th Streets would become the crux of Broadway— the industry, not just the street name — also called the Great White Way.

Many businesses bet that New York’s first subway would bring commercial success and looked to move their businesses close to it. The New York Times was one of those businesses, building what was at the time, the city’s second tallest skyscraper, in 1904 on the site of the Pabst Hotel, pictured above. The Times Corporation, together with the Interborough Rapid Transit Company also petitioned the city to rename Longacre Square to Times Square, which was granted that same year. [Incidentally, Herald Square is also named after a newspaper, one of the Times’ competitors, the New York Herald.] The Times Square station immediately became the subway system’s most important hub(1) , and remains the city’s most used transit station. Although boastful, the Times was prescient with its headline “Times Square is the Name of City’s New Center.” The New York Times launched the first New Year’s Eve Celebration in Times Square that year, to fête the opening of the brand-new Times Building.

Though Longacre Square was the official term prior to the Times Square name change, this area was at the northern end of what police of the time called The Tenderloin. Theaters abounded, as did brothels, and police of the time were known to profit from vice by collecting graft(2). The nickname “Tenderloin” did not stick as it did in San Francisco, where there is still an area with that name, but the reputation for prostitution, brothels, saloons, and nightclubs would linger.

Times Square only took a few years to transition from quaint to commercial. The 1909 view above shows a modest sign shop and toggery, but it also shows the Gaiety Theater and Churchill’s restaurant. Churchill’s was one of the area’s lobster palaces, described as the city’s first nightclubs: expensive, elegantly decorated, with orchestras, dancing and floor shows(3).  Lobster palaces did serve lobster, but they also served up quite the party atmosphere. They thrived until Prohibition and were a defining characteristic of early Times Square(4). One guidebook of that era even calls out restaurants with cabaret and dancing with a star, Churchill’s among them.

The above image from 1912 shows something for which Times Square is well known: sensational and impactful advertising. The advent of neon signage would particularly alter the look of Times Square as advertisers would compete against each other for the most eye-catching display. In Times Square Spectacular, author Darcy Tell wrote, “the most popular attractions in the district were free: enormous electric advertising signs that sprouted on roofs all over Times Square. Even on Sunday evenings, when the theaters were closed, crowds came to stroll up and down Broadway at the latest dazzling spectaculars.”

Broadway earned the nickname “The Great White Way” around the time that it became (possibly) the first street in America to be fully lit by electric light. The moniker moved uptown along the avenue as the theaters did, and by the time that Times Square was named, it was already there. The electrically lit advertising boon of the square helped the term stick. Over time, advertisements would become even brighter and more grandiose, and the theaters would remain centered along Times Square. One advertiser, O.J. Gude, has been attributed as the creator of the “Great White Way.” His ads changed the landscape and had a lasting impact.

Revues, such as Ziegfield Follies, were popular in the early days of Times Square. The influx of caberet changed the ambience of the lobster palaces to what many considered less “high class.” There was also an influx movie theaters influx after 1914. The Strand theater opened in April, 1914 — a huge movie palace which sat almost 3,500. Movie palace shows dominate the scene for the next few years and they adopted the elaborate lit ad styles to draw in movie-goers.

The Wrigley’s sign seen above was in place from 1917-1924 and was a full block long. Crowds would come just to stare at this sign, and during World War I, it helped to promote war bond sales. When installed, it was the Gude Company’s largest sign ever. Advertising, movies, and tourism would dominate Times Square during the 1920s, when Prohibition’s policies and the subsequent economic depression would cause other types of Times Square businesses to fail, such as cabarets and theaters(5).

Many live performance theaters converted to movie theaters during the Great Depression. Vaudeville was especially hard hit by the advent of sound film. The Depression saw a rise to more bawdy entertainment and several burlesque shows, theaters that catered to ‘murder, mayhem, and adventure,” and post-Prohibition, the opening of several small bars(6). The Encyclopedia of New York City states “the neighborhood changed dramatically after the stock market crash of 1929. Few new theaters were built, and during the Depression many existing ones were converted into cheap ‘grinder’ houses that offered continuous showings of sexually explicit films.” This era also brought burlesque shows, peep shows, penny arcades, and dime museums to the neighborhood.

Service on the IRT Flushing Line (7 Train) subway line under 42nd Street was increased when the line expanded from Grand Central to Times Square in the 1920s. In addition, this train was part of the city’s efforts to get people to the 1939 World’s Fair (records at NYPL) location in Queens. WPA employees removed several of the existing surface streetcars tracks as subway service increased.

The glamorous reputation of Times Square remained largely intact during the Great Depression, despite the influx of more ‘bawdy’ businesses, and World War II brought renewed prosperity as well as many who catered to the entertainment of military personnel on their way overseas. Pop culture such as the Broadway play and Hollywood film On the Town demonstrate this, but the area soon became a haven for prostitution and hustlers. Attempts to thwart to growth of sex-related businesses in the 1950s mostly missed the mark. Watch footage of Times Square in the 1950s via YouTube.  

By 1960, the New York Times ran an article titled “Life on W. 42nd St. A Study in Decay” in which the area is called “the ‘worst’ in town.” In this article, the reporter dwells on the elements that gave Times Square its reputation: vandalism, prostitution (hetero- and homosexual), loitering (especially in the subway arcades), shops selling knives or sexually explicit materials, grindhouse theaters, and believe it or not, loneliness and rock ‘n’ roll. In the book The Devil’s Playground, author James Traub analyzes the article, which ran front page in the Times, saying that things had not suddenly become more deviant in Times Square, just more visible.

The 1960 Times article expatiates on the homosexual presence in Times Square which had become quite visible. Several histories of the area, in particular Times Square Red, Times Square Blueand Inventing Times Square, and the Times Square Alliance's website elaborate that the gay history of Times Square is quite long. Following Stonewall in 1969, the Gay Liberation Front marched in Times Square.  

Additional visibility of the area came from the Oscar-winning film Midnight Cowboy. This article by the Bowery Boys gives a comprehensive summary of the film and its relation to locations in New York, mostly along Times Square.

The 1976 film Taxi Driver“begins with a blurry surreal trip through Times Square and the surrounding blocks” [via Scouting NY], so Times Square as a setting in this era essentially tells viewers a lot about what they need to know about Robert De Niro’s lead character Travis Bickle, who works the night shift driving cabs in the epitome of 1970s seediness. The Scouting NY ‘before and after’ images really present the remarkable changes that Times Square has seen since revitalization efforts gained momentum in the 1980s and '90s.

Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins all had a hand in development plans for Times Square, but Mayor Rudy Giuliani is most often associated with the movement that brought big businesses, such as large-scale theaters, retail shops, restaurants, and hotels back into Times Square. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration brought in pedestrian plazas which allowed more free movement in the area. Sometimes referred to as “Disneyfication,” redevelopment in Times Square has been intense in the last 30 years. This interactive feature of the New York Times shows the changes. Over time, Times Square has offered both the high life and the underbelly of New York, and it seems that New Yorkers demand both aspects of their city.

Current Google Street View shows a different Times Square, the product of two dozen years of revitalization efforts. One Times Square is obscured by the electronic billboards that bring in more revenue than leasing the building to tenants would. It’s still a place of theater culture, of massive hotels, of busy subways (the busiest!), and shopping.

More images of Times Square are available in NYPL Digital Collections, the collections portal of the Museum of the City of New York, and via the Municipal Archives.

A Times Square History Reading List

Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World edited by William R. Taylor

Times Square Spectacular: Lighting Up Broadway by Darcy Tell

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub

Times Square: A Pictorial History by Jill Stone

Where the Ball Drops: Days and Nights in Times Square by Daniel Makagon

On the Town : One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square by Marshall Berman

Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block by Anthony Bianco

The Century in Times Square [from the archives of the New York Times]

Tales of Times Square by Josh Alan Friedman

In 1976, 416 Waverly Avenue in Brooklyn was the address of two incongruous but similarly named businesses: VIP Sewer Cleaning and Verify Investigation & Protection Services (ie., VIP Services). Both were the work of one man, John Benjamin Alfred Redman, aka “Johnny Redd”. On April 6, 1978, the photographer Dinanda Nooney (1918-2004) arrived to photograph the “plumber extraordinair” [sic] in his home, of which she noted the “exhuberance [sic] of decor reflects his enjoyment of life.”

Johnny Redd (1934-2006) was the son of Barbadian immigrants, one of seven children raised just two doors down at 424 Waverly Avenue. Aged 43, he lived there still, now with wife Beatrice and daughter Lisa, and owned the adjacent garden lot and the two story garage from which he ran his businesses.  Built in 1894 for the Hoagland family, wealthy scions of Royal Baking Powder, the former carriage house now sheltered Redd’s very 20th century steed: a Harley Davidson Electra Glide so extravagantly customized as “to now look as if it were wearing a chrome Oscar De La Renta ball gown.” It was gold and chrome plated, encrusted with rhinestones, emblazoned with dollar signs and his name, and outfitted with a radio which in April of 1978 would have had hits from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in heavy rotation. A 1986 New Yorker profile notes the attention Mr. Redd and his bike had attracted from beautiful women and celebrities (Muhammad Ali, Mick Jagger, Telly Savalas). But of his own star-turn in a movie titled “Satan Studs”, he is uncharacteristically coy: “It wasn’t Rambo or nothing.” Though Dinanda Nooney doesn’t seem to have photographed the motorcycle, she does capture him in his natural habitat as both a proud and successful family man, and a bon vivant of the disco era.

Between January 1978 and April 1979, Nooney networked her way through Brooklyn documenting residences and their occupants, asking each for a referral to another willing subject. Over 150 families or individuals entrusted her to capture glimpses into their private worlds and personal tastes. The portraits are at once intimate and yet tantalizingly brief. Perhaps behind each one is a character as extraordinary, in its own way, as that of Johnny Redd. On May 9, 1978 she photographed Conrad Milster at work as chief engineer of Pratt Institute’s steam power plant, where he still works today, and whose enthusiasm for steam whistles gave rise to a unique neighborhood New Years’ tradition for a half century.  And on March 4 of that year, she visited the Park Slope home of Gerard Basquiat, Nora Fitzpatrick and daughters Lisane and Jeanine; not present that day was 18 year old son Jean-Michel who had left home and was on his way to stardom as a painter.

Ranging from Coney Island to Greenpoint, from Bushwick to Bay Ridge, her exterior views are portraits in their own right, suggesting a rich inner life- if only you could peek behind the front door, as Nooney and her camera did. Viewed in proximity to each other on the map below, her photographs give us cumulative portraits of Brooklyn neighborhoods at the close of the ‘70s, and thanks to Google Street View you can marvel at how much, or little, has changed in this last quarter century.

The Dinanda Nooney Brooklyn Photographs were a gift from the photographer in 1995. A selection of the photographs are currently on view in Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photographs.

To check out our growing collection of photo-mapping projects, visit PhotoGeographies.

To celebrate Lewis Carroll’s upcoming birthday—and my un-birthday!—let’s venture down the rabbit hole to explore depictions of Alice, his most famous creation, here at The New York Public Library.

Lewis Carroll, the writing pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, conceived of Alice’s story as an entertainment for Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell, daughters of Oxford colleague Henry Liddell and his wife, also named Lorina. He presented the handwritten manuscript to namesake Alice Liddell as a Christmas present in 1864. The manuscript is now in the British Museum, but the George Arents Collection holds a facsimile that shows us Carroll’s very first sketches of the adventurous Alice.

Once Carroll decided to publish his story, he secured the talents of Sir John Tenniel to provide its illustrations. Tenniel’s drawings were made into wood engravings by George and Edward Dalziel; these engravings were then electrotyped and printed in the first edition of the text. Supremely unhappy with the quality of the printing, Carroll and Tenniel suppressed this 1865 edition, making it now quite rare. In 1987-1988, Jonathan Stephenson of The Rocket Press used the original wood blocks, which had rather miraculously survived, to print fresh, high-quality illustrations. These were carefully prepared with underlays and overlays—called make-ready in printer’s parlance—in order to capture the detail and artistry of Tenniel and the Dalziels’ work. Unfortunately for Tenniel’s professional integrity, Alice’s London publishers were left with thousands of sheets of the suppressed first edition and sold them off to New York’s D. Appleton and Company, who slapped new title pages on top and sold them as the first American edition. Fortunately for us, that means we can now see the suppressed illustrations next to their fine press reprints!

The Rare Book Division holds several copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. These range from 1866 to 1988 and appear in English, French, German, and Italian. A handful are presentation copies from Carroll to his friends, including Effie Millais, wife of John Ruskin and John Everett Millais. One is even signed by Alice herself—now with the married surname of Hargreaves.

Since Alice’s first publication in 1865, many illustrators have tried their hand at depicting its heroine—Arthur Rackham, Salvador Dalí, and Ralph Steadman have all had a go—though Tenniel’s version remains indelibly linked to the text in most readers’ minds. In a 1929 edition, artist Willy Pogany lent his interpretation; his Alice has a flapper bob and an unflappable countenance as she navigates the madness of Wonderland. Pogany’s illustrations spill over onto the book’s decorative endpapers, which group all of Carroll’s characters together in a riot of color.

It’s hard to discuss Alice illustrations without mentioning the Pennyroyal Press’ edition of 1982, which comes from our collection of private press printing. Barry Moser used wood engraving, the same process as John Tenniel, to produce illustrations that feel more mysterious and even sinister than most interpretations. As Moser himself put it, “I have tried to keep the illustrations weird (yet reasonable), and grotesque (yet humorous), but I have not tried to make them pretty or graceful.” My favorite depiction is probably the Cheshire Cat, but it’s hard to argue with the haunting portrait of Alice that closes out the volume. Moser used his own daughter as a model because he thought she resembled a young Alice Liddell—what do you think?

Whether you’re at home or in one of our research or branch libraries, NYPL has a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ready for you. Just imagine a tag from Lewis Carroll bearing the instructions “READ ME.”

First image courtesy Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. All other images: Rare Book Division. New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, Tilden Foundations.

With the bleakest part of the winter now upon us, some readers may be craving a feast of Scandinavian noir. Jeremy Megraw's excellent blog post from 2013 covered a lot of this chilly ground, but here are a few more contemporary Swedes (and one Norwegian) I've enjoyed.

I'll start with the pseudonymous Arne Dahl (real name: Jan Arnald), an elegant and imaginative writer whose stories tend to have a touch of magic realism. He is the author of the "Intercrime Series," about a fictional elite Stockholm police unit tasked with working "outside the box" to solve particularly baroque crimes with an international flavor, as when an American suspected of a gruesome killing in Newark eludes a police stakeout at Stockholm's airport and proceeds to spread mayhem around the Swedish capital (Bad Blood, the first title published, though it's the second in the fictional chronology).

So far only the first two Intercrime books, Misterioso and Bad Blood, are available in English in the US (a third is out in the UK), but the first five were the basis of a successful TV series (available on DVD), so more can be hoped for. The Intercrime Series should be catnip for fans of police teamwork, and Paul Hjelm, Kerstin Holm and the rest of the quirky cops in the group are vividly characterized. There is also a lot of humor in these books, something that can't always be said of Scandinavian crime stories. Dahl's newer series, the Opcop Quartet, featuring many of the same characters in a more international context, is also excellent, but not yet in English. For more information, see the author's website.

Camilla Läckberg sets her crime novels in her home town of Fjällbacka, a small fishing community on the west coast of Sweden. The series began with The Ice Princess, in which a young woman's corpse is discovered in a bathtub of icy water, her wrists slashed—but was it really suicide? Erica Falck, a childhood friend, is moved to investigate.

The detectives at the center of the stories are a professional (Patrik Hedström, a cop) and an amateur (Falck, a writer, his girlfriend and later his wife) and the stories tend to involve a large cast of characters, all of whom know one another and all of whom have a motive for the heinous crimes that occur… and of course no alibi. For this reason Läckberg has been called the Swedish Agatha Christie, but for me that title is more deservedly applied to a writer from an earlier generation, Maria Lang. (Lang is also eminently readable, but unfortunately, only three titles from her vast output have been translated into English, though a recent internationally distributed TV series may change that.) Several of Läckberg's books have also been filmed. Her website is camillalackberg.com.

In Liza Marklund's crime series the heroine is also an amateur and a writer, in this case a journalist employed by a Stockholm tabloid. The crimes are often shocking and draw the narrative into contemporary social issues such as the international drug trade and terrorism, but for me the real interest is the complicated, emotionally volatile character at the center of the stories, Annika Bengtzon, who never met an anger she could manage or an impulse she could control.

In the course of ten books (so far) we follow her through a disastrous first relationship, an ill-advised and never completely happy marriage, motherhood, and a long slow-burning flirt with the man who may be true love of her life. The texture of her everyday life, and that of those close to her, is portrayed in such detail that non-Swedish readers may feel they have completed a residency in her homeland when they've worked through the series. Several of the Bengtzon books are also available as TV adaptations on DVD, but be advised that Annika's life has been considerably reordered in this version. (The books were also published out of chronological order; The Bomber was the first to be published, but Exposed is where Annika's story begins.) More on Marklund's website: lizamarklund.com

Sweden's "second city," the west coast metropolis Gothenburg (Göteborg, in Swedish), provides the crime scenes in the novels of Helene Tursten. Her heroine is Detective Inspector Irene Huss of the Gothenburg Police, a former European judo champion, happily married to a professional chef and the mother of teenaged twin girls.

Unlike the protagonist in many police procedurals, Huss is not depressed, substance-dependent or a failure in her relationships, but the stories may involve her unusual private life in unexpected ways, and she seethes when she occasionally encounters sexism on the job—even from a female superior. But her colleagues in Gothenburg's Violent Crimes Unit are a generally competent and sympathetic lot, as they are confronted with such baffling cases as the fragment of a tattooed torso that washes up on a beach with its limbs apparently surgically severed (The Torso), or the hit-and-run accident where the victim, a retired cop, may be connected to an international sex trafficking scheme unraveling around the body of a murdered thirteen-year-old girl found near the accident scene (The Beige Man). There are ten books in the Huss series, beginning with Den krossade Tanghästen ("The Shattered Tang Horse," unimaginatively translated as Detective Inspector Huss). Yes, there's a TV series too. Ms. Tursten, who says she has definitely abandoned Irene and is now busy with a new series, doesn't seem to have an official website.

One of the newest stars on the Swedish crime horizon is a husband-wife team, Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, publishing under the name Lars Kepler. They have produced five books so far starring the Finnish-born Stockholm supercop Joona Linna, who is never wrong about a clue, never fails to pick up on the one key detail in an investigation that everyone else missed, and is never, ever daunted by being outnumbered and outgunned.

Beginning with the second book we also have Joona's female counterpart, Saga Bauer of the Swedish Security Police, as beautiful as a fairy-tale princess and twice as tough as nails. I find these books a little (for want of a better word) trashy, compared with the production of some of the authors on this list, and a very large pinch of "suspension of disbelief" is sometimes required, especially when it comes to the Hannibal Lecter-like exploits of the villains. But they move fast, and the stories do keep the reader involved as one suspenseful situation follows another. The series began with The Hypnotist, which was also a feature film that received a brief U.S. release last year (as an aside, the writing, with high-speed car chases and showdowns in picturesquely desolate places, sometimes seems designed with an eye on the slogan "Soon to be a major motion picture"), but my personal favorite so far is the third installment, The Fire Witness. The story is tighter and more credible than in the earlier books, there are twists within twists, and the working out of an incorporated ghost story is surprising and effective. The Lars Kepler official website is larskepler.com

The lone Norwegian on my list is Gunnar Staalesen, whose hero, the Bergen private eye Varg Veum, is of the hard-boiled school, though his previous life as a child welfare worker gives him a special empathy for the younger set on both sides of the criminal line. In one of the early Veum books (the second in the series, Yours Until Death), our hero takes on "the youngest client I'd ever had," an eight-year-old boy whose bicycle was stolen by a gang of teenaged toughs. As he follows up on the case he is led into a tangle of misery, desperation and eventually murder in the grim housing projects on the outer fringes of the Norwegian "good society." Bergen, a proud old city on Norway's west coast with hilly streets and legendarily rainy weather, bears a certain spiritual resemblance to the classic noir metropolis San Francisco, and it's not hard to imagine Veum hanging out in a bar, trading gumshoe tips with the likes of Sam Spade. (Staalesen admits to drawing inspiration from the "holy trinity of American crime writers," as he calls Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.)

Staalesen is somewhat older than the other writers presented here, and when the Veum series began in the late seventies, there was no Internet, no cellphones, and the world was quite a different place. Norway too has undergone considerable cultural upheaval since that time, but Veum is still plying his trade in our fraught decade, older but as melancholy as ever about the way of the world and man's inhumanity to man (and child).  Only a handful of these books are available in English so far, but a new UK publisher, Orenda Books, has taken up the Varg Veum cause, and translations of his three latest are promised for the next couple of years. There are recent film/DVD versions of a number of the books that update the action of the earlier stories to the present and soften the character's edges. Staalesen's (or rather Veum's) official website is in Norwegian only (with some links to international content): vargveum.no

For information about all of these authors and their works, besides the official websites given above, I recommend a Gale Group database, the Literature Resource Center, which is available for free to anyone with an NYPL library card. In particular, one of its components, Contemporary Authors Online, has biographical information, bibliographies and extensive listings of print and online reviews and other features for everyone mentioned here.

I'll follow Jeremy Megraw's example and list the main crime series of these authors, in chronological order (or in the fictional chronological order in the case of Arne Dahl and Liza Marklund). English titles of books not yet translated are in square brackets, original titles are in parentheses, and catalog links are given where available. 

Arne Dahl — Intercrime Series (1998–2007)

1. Misterioso, also published as The Blinded Man (Misterioso)
2. Bad Blood (Ont blod)
3. To The Top of the Mountain (available in the UK) (Upp till toppen av berget)
4. [Europe Blues] (Europa blues)
5. [Many Waters] (De största vatten) (In Polish: Wody wielkie)
6. [A Midsummer Night's Dream] (En midsommarnattsdröm)
7. [Requiem] (Dödsmässa)
8. [Hidden Numbers] (Mörkertal)
9. [Afterquake] (Efterskalv)
10. [Eye in the Sky] (Himmelsöga)

Camilla Läckberg — Fjällbacka series (2003–2014)

1. The Ice Princess (Isprinsessan)
2. The Preacher (Predikanten)
3. The Stonecutter (Stenhuggaren)
4. The Gallows Bird, also published as The Stranger (Olycksfågeln)
5. The Hidden Child (Tyskungen)
6. The Drowning (Sjöjungfrun)
7. The Lost Boy (Fyrvaktaren)
8. Buried Angels (Änglamakerskan)
9. [The Lion Tamer] (Lejontämjaren)

Some titles available in Albanian, Italian, Polish, Russian, or Spanish.

Liza Marklund — Annika Bengtzon series (1998–2013)

1. Exposed (earlier translation: Studio 69) (Studio sex)
2. Vanished (earlier translation: Paradise) (Paradiset)
3. Prime Time (Prime Time)
4. The Bomber (Sprängaren)
5. Red Wolf (Den Röda Vargen)
6. Last Will (Nobels testamente)
7. Lifetime (Livstid)
8. The Long Shadow (En plats i solen)
9. Borderline (Du gamla, du fria)
10. [proposed English title Nora's Book] (Lyckliga gatan)

Some titles available in Italian, Polish, or Russian.

Helene Tursten — Irene Huss series (1998–2012)

1. Detective Inspector Huss (Den krossade tanghästen)
2. Night Rounds (Nattrond)
3. The Torso (Tatuerad torso)
4. [Cold Murder] (Kallt mord)
5. The Glass Devil (Glasdjävulen)
6. The Golden Calf (Guldkalven)
7. The Fire Dance (Eldsdansen)
8. The Beige Man (En man med litet ansikte)
9. [The Treacherous Network] (Det lömska nätet)
10. [Awake in the Dark] (Den som vakar i mörkret)
11. [Shielded by Shadows] (I skydd av skuggorna)

Lars Kepler — Joona Linna series (2009–2014)

1. The Hypnotist (Hypnotisören) (In Italian: L'Ipnotista)
2. The Nightmare (Paganinikontraktet)
3. The Fire Witness(Eldvittnet)
4. The Sandman (Sandmannen)
5. [Stalker] (Stalker)

Gunnar Staalesen — Varg Veum series (1977–2014) (Novels only)

1. [Fox Guarding the Henhouse] (Bukken til havresekken)
2. Yours Until Death (Din, til døden)
3. [Sleeping Beauty Slept for One Hundred Years] (Tornerose sov i hundre år)
4. [The Woman in the Fridge] (Kvinnen i kjøleskapet)
5. At Night All Wolves Are Grey (I mørket er alle ulver grå)
6. [Black Sheep] (Svarte får)
7. [Fallen Angels] (Falne engler)
8. [Bitter Flowers] (Bitre blomster)
9. [Buried Dogs Do Not Bite] (Begravde hunder biter ikke)
10. The Writing on the Wall (Skriften på veggen)
11. [Through a Glass Darkly] (Som i et speil)
12. [Face to Face] (Ansikt til ansikt)
13. The Consorts of Death (Dødens drabanter)
14. Cold Hearts (Kalde hjerter)
15. We Shall Inherit the Wind (Vi skal arve vinden)
16. Where Roses Never Die (Der hvor roser aldri dør)
17. No One Is So Safe in Danger (Ingen er så trygg i fare)

As a member of the Wertheim study, I was honored to be invited to write a blog post about the Library's significant holdings related to flamenco. The footage of Juana Vargas "La Macarrona" (1870-1947), filmed in 1917 by Léonide Massine and held in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the Library for the Performing Arts, is one of the Library's most important, and little-known, flamenco treasures.[1]

La Macarrona was considered the Queen of the Gypsies. She was the Queen of the cafés, in her thick Andalusian accent, la reina der mundo (the queen of the world). Like the cafés chantant of Belle Époque France and the music halls of Britain and the United States, the Spanish cafés cantantes were performance venues catering to a newly affluent, often working-class, urban audience. There, in the second half of the 19th century, flamenco was born, and Macarrona was one of flamenco's founding mothers.

This photo by Emilio Beauchy, records the performing group of a late-19th century café cantante. According to José Blas Vega in his 1987 Los cafés cantantes de Sevilla, it was taken in one of the most renowned cafés, the Café del Burrero.

Macarrona was a Gitana—a Spanish Gypsy—who came of age in cafés like the Burrero, creating a movement style and elaborating a repertory of dances that have impacted all flamenco dancers who followed. She travelled little outside of Spain; she never came to the Americas. But the only film of her dancing of which I am aware is held at the New York Public Library. A donation of the Léonide Massine Estate, this spectacular footage is one of the most important extant filmed records of the early period of flamenco dance that is often termed flamenco's "Golden Age." I began studying Macarrona in 2012 while co-curating, with Ninotchka Bennahum, the exhibit 100 Years of Flamenco at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and I wrote about Macarrona in my chapter on Carmen Amaya in that catalog.

In the spring of 1916, with World War I raging, Ballets Russes director Serge Diaghilev accepted an invitation from Spain's King Alfonso XIII to bring his company to perform at Madrid's Teatro Real. In Spain, principal dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine, whose choreography was of seminal importance to Diaghilev's radical modernization of ballet, was introduced to flamenco.

Massine recalled,

Once we were firmly established in Madrid I began to spend my free evenings in the local cafes, watching the flamenco dancers. I was fascinated by their instinctive sense of rhythm, their natural elegance, and the intensity of their movements. They seemed to combine perfect physical control with flawless timing and innate dignity, something I had never seen before in any native folk-dancing.[2]

That year, Massine and Diaghilev met composer Manuel de Falla and flamenco dancer Félix Fernández García, "El Loco" (1896-1941) who became their guides on several tours through Spain. Falla was from Granada and already interested in flamenco; like his friend, the much younger poet Federico García Lorca, with whom he would organize the first Festival of Cante Jondo (Deep Song) in Granada in 1922, Falla was part of a Modernist circle seeking to reenvision and reclaim flamenco from the hostility it had faced among Spain's educated classes at the turn of the twentieth century.

In 1915, Falla had composed his first flamenco ballet: El amor brujo (Love the Magician)—a Gitanería (performance of Gitano-ness) sung and danced by the famous flamenco artist Pastora Imperio and conceived as a vehicle for presenting flamenco on a wider stage than those of the cafés cantantes which, by the turn of the twentieth century, struggled to compete with the influx of new entertainment such as vaudeville, film, and American jazz.

Describing the winter of 1916-1917, which he spent in Rome creating his Futurist ballet Parade (1917), Massine said "our studio in the Piazza Venezia in Rome was the meeting place for an ever-widening circle of artists," including painter Pablo Picasso, poet Jean Cocteau, and composer Eric Satie.[3]"Cubism was at its height," and Satie's music was a "subtle synthesis of jazz and ragtime."[4]

Back in Spain in the spring and summer of 1917, and following the April 7 premiere in Madrid's Teatro Eslava of Falla's pantomimeEl corregidor y la molinera, Diaghilev and Massine decided to adapt Falla's piece for the Ballets Russes. The resulting ballet, The Three-Cornered Hat (in Spanish, El sombrero de tres picos; in French, Tricorne), premiered July 22, 1919, at London's Alhambra Theatre. The sets and costumes were by Picasso; the libretto was by Gregorio Martínez Sierra, who had also written El amor brujo.

Falla wrote flamenco airs into his Three-Cornered Hat: the Farruca del Molinero, the bulerías in the first verse of Casadita, Casadita and the fandango in La danza de la Molinera. Massine prepared for his choreography of these flamenco forms by first studying with Félix and then with Félix's teacher, José Molina.[5] In July 1917, Massine filmed Juana Vargas, "La Macarrona," with a 16-millimeter camera he had bought in Rome the previous winter.

Although she is mentioned neither in the NYPL catalog, nor in Massine's memoir My Life in Ballet, nor in any other documentation I have found, Massine also filmed another dancer who I surmise is Juana's sister Maria Vargas, also called "La Macarrona" (b. 1865). Juana's fame has eclipsed that of her sister, but in the late-19th and early-20th century the sisters often performed together as "Las Macarronas." Massine also filmed Juana's partner, their cousin Antonio López Clavijo, "Ramírez," (1879-1927).[6] The nickname "Macarrona" derived from their ancestors, Tío Juan and Tío Vicente "Macarrón," mentioned by Antonio Machado y Álavarez "Demófilo" in his 1881 list of "Cantadores de flamenco."[7] The sobriquet "Macarrón," is tricky to translate. Macarrón is simply macaroni, a kind of pasta, although in the late-eighteenth century (think of the song Yankee Doodle) it signified effeminate foppishness. According to the Diccionario popular de la lengua castellana of 1882, macarrónea is a burlesque composition in which words of various languages are mixed up and interwoven, and macarrónico describes this composition's ridiculous language and lowbrow style.[8]

The Macarrona footage is listed in the NYPL catalog as "Spanish dancers" with the call numbers *MGZIDF 4750 for the digital video streaming file that you can access onsite at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and *MGZHB 2 - 1000 no. 268 for the 16mm film viewing copy, which is also available for screening at the Library for the Performing Arts. The silent film encompasses four segments: one of Ramírez dancing alone on a sunny rooftop, and three of Juana and María dancing in a patio to accompaniment from two male guitarists and with a passel of children seated on the ground. In the first of the three, the dancer I think is Juana dances what we now call bulerías rhythm. In the second segment, she dances alegrías with a train, a bata de cola. The third clip features the dancer I think is Juana's sister María, dancing in the rhythm of tangos.[9]

Viewing the film, it is striking how similar the dance is to that of today. Juana employs the lifted and majestic posture, punctuated by deep breaks in the hips and leans, that epitomizes today's flamenco.[10] She dances with her hands and arms in tension, with stretch and sensuality. An easy stateliness distinguishes Juana's dance from that of her sister, who is more agile and whose head and torso are more mobile, less held. Both dancers seem to improvise, taking basic elements and recombining them in various ways, signaling calls and breaks with arm gestures (an inward circle of the arms) and foot patterns (the recoje, three steps backward), as we do today.

But María performed the gesture that most intrigued me: in a clip that lasts only one minute and eight seconds, she trembled her open palms and fingers—"jazz hands"—twice in her tangos.[11]

This hand gesture is not part of the fundamental ornamental twirlings of fingers and wrists that today echo the sonic layer of the song's continuous melisma, nor of the emphatic hand gestures that punctuate the cante (song).[12] This hand gesture is performed in quotation marks: it is pantomimic (although not narrative). It evokes the sonic specter of a trumpet's high brassy trill: it evokes jazz. Interestingly, alongside characteristic flamenco hand-gestures evoking the movements of the bullfight, a torero-like thrust forward in the hips, palmas, pitos (finger snaps), jumps, bravura walks on the knee, and footwork, Massine also choreographed this gesture into his Farruca del Molinero from The Three-Cornered Hat.[13]

As part of my research, I have added a soundtrack of palmas and a visual box showing the counts to the first and third Macarrona clips, at both 50% and 100% speed (which is slowed down slightly to compensate for the fewer frames per second in 1917 film technology). These modified clips have been donated to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division and will soon be available to view at the Library for the Performing Arts.

The library holds several references relevant to this footage:

Nommick, Yvan, and Antonio Álvarez Cañibano, Los ballets russes de Diaghilev y España. Granada: Fundación Archivo Manuel de Falla, 2000.

Bennahum, Ninotchka, and K. Meira Goldberg, 100 Years of Flamenco in New York City. New York: New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 2013.

Blas Vega, José y Manuel Rios Ruiz, Diccionario enciclopédico ilustrado del flamenco y maestros del flamenco. Madrid: Cinterco, 1988.

Blas Vega, José. Los cafés cantantes de Sevilla. Madrid: Cinterco, 1987.

Garafola, Lynn, and Nancy V. N. Baer. The Ballets Russes and Its World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

García-Márquez, Vicente, Massine: a biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Machado y Alvarez, Antonio, and Enrique Jesús Rodríguez Baltanás, Colección de cantes flamencos: recogidos y anotados por Demófilo (Sevilla: Signatura Ediciones, (1881) 1999.

Massine, Leonide, My life in ballet. London: Macmillan, 1968.

Mosch, Ulrich, "Manuel de Falla: The Three-Cornered Hat," in Boehm, Gottfried, Ulrich Mosch, and Katharina Schmidt, Canto D'amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music, 1914-1935. Basel: Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel/Kunstmuseum, 1996, 217-21.

Rodríguez Gómez, Fernando ("Fernando el de Triana"). Arte y artistas flamencos. Madrid: Clan, 1952.

Captions

Figure 1. Juana Vargas "La Macarrona." Photograph, photographer unknown, no date. In Fernando Rodríguez Gómez, "Fernando el de Triana,"Arte y artistas flamencos (Madrid: Editoriales Andaluzas Unidas, S.A., [1935] 1986).

Figure 2. Café Cantante, Seville, c. 1889. El café del burrero. Photographer: Emilio Beauchy. Roger-Viollet Archives, Paris, France.

Figure 3. Still image from Spanish Dancers (I surmise Juana Vargas dancing alegrías), filmed July 1917 by Léonide Massine in preparation for his choreography for Le Tricorne, (The Three Cornered Hat). Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Courtesy of Tatiana Weinbaum, Lorca Massine, and Theodor Massine.

Figure 4. "Portrait of Russian dancer Léonide Massine (Leonid Fyodorovich Myasin, 1895-1979)." Leon Bakst, 1914. Wikicommons.

Figure 5. "Manuel de Falla con bastón," Archivo Manuel de Falla. Wikicommons.

Figure 6. Pastora Imperio. Julio Romero de Torres. 1913. Wikicommons.

Figure 7. "Léonide Massine dans le rôle du Prestidigitateur chinois de Parade, Ballet de Léonide Massine Création au Théâtre du Châtelet en 1917." Lachmann Photographie, BnF. Exposition Ballets russes Bibliothèque-musée de l'Opéra de Paris ( www.operadeparis.fr/cns11/live/onp/Saison_2009_2010/Conve... ). Wikicommons.

Figure 8. "Pablo Picasso (wearing a beret) and scene painters sitting on the front cloth for Léonide Massine's ballet Parade , staged by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, 1917," Lachmann photographer, December 31, 1916. Wikicommons.

Figure 9. Still image from Spanish Dancers (I surmise María Vargas dancing tangos), filmed July 1917 by Léonide Massine in preparation for his choreography for Le Tricorne, (The Three Cornered Hat). Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Courtesy of Tatiana Weinbaum, Lorca Massine, and Theodor Massine.

Figure 10. Still image from Spanish Dancers (I surmise María Vargas dancing tangos), filmed July 1917 by Léonide Massine in preparation for his choreography for Le Tricorne, (The Three Cornered Hat). Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Courtesy of Tatiana Weinbaum, Lorca Massine, and Theodor Massine.

Notes

[1] I am most grateful to Léonide Massine's heirs, Tatiana Weinbaum, Lorca Massine, and Theodor Massine, for their generosity in allowing my work on Macarrona to be published and to be illustrated by still images from the footage. Thank you to Barbara Cohen Stratyner, Curator of Exhibitions, Shelby Cullom Davis Museum, The New York Library for the Performing Arts; Tanisha Jones, Director of the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image, The New York Library for the Performing Arts; and Jay Barksdale, director of the Wertheim Study. I am also grateful to François Bernadi for helping me capture these images.

[2] Léonide Massine, My Life in Ballet (London: Macmillan, 1968), 89. For more on Massine's "neoprimitivist method" of choreographing Tricorne, combining "authenticity and stylized gesture," and "reworking…a familiar nineteenth-century story as modernist narrative," see Lynn Garafola, "The Choreography of Le Tricorne," in Vicente García-Márquez, Yvan Nommick, and Antonio Alvarez Cañibano, eds., Los Ballets Russes de Diaghilev y España (Granada: Archivo Manuel de Falla, 2012), 89-95. Quotations are from page 91.

[3] Massine, My Life, 101; Garcia-Marquez, Massine, 80-81.

[4] Massine, My Life, 101.

[5] García-Márquez, Massine, 111; Daniel Pineda Novo, Juana, "la Macarrona" y el baile en los cafés cantantes (Cornellà de Llobregat [Barcelona]: Aquí + Más Multimedia, 1996), 43; Massine, My Life, 117-118; Alfonso Puig, Flora Albaicín, Sebastià Gasch, Kenneth Lyons, Robert Marrast, Ursula Patzies, and Ramón Vives, El arte del baile flamenco (Barcelona: Ed. Poligrafa, 1977), 68; Fernando el de Triana, Arte y artistas flamencos (Madrid: Editoriales Andaluzas Unidas, S.A., [1935] 1986), 174, 222, 224. The catalog from the exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, May 12-October 6, 2013, includes a page from Massine's notes from these lessons in Spanish dance (Jane Pritchard and Geoffrey Marsh, Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929 [London: V & A Publishing, 2013], 84).

[6] Fernando de Triana said of Maria, "This good dance artist was on the way to becoming a star. But as she was almost there, she became interested in singing and neglected somewhat that path which, in my judgment, she should have taken" (Fernando el de Triana, Arte y artistas, 148, 150). His book is the only place I have seen a photo identified as María (p. 75). The most complete biography is Daniel Pineda Novo's book on Juana "la Macarrona." See also Pineda Novo's Antonio Ramírez, el baile gitano de Jerez (Jerez de la Frontera: Centro Andaluz de Flamenco, 2005). Ramirez is listed in the NYPL catalog as "Ramirito." I am grateful to Juan Vergillos for sending me both of Pineda's books.

[7] Antonio Machado y Álvarez "Demófilo," in his list of "Cantadores de flamenco: Jerez de la Frontera," lists "Tío Vicente Macarrón" and "Tío Juan Macarrón, cantador general." (Machado y Alvarez, Antonio, and Enrique Jesús Rodríguez Baltanás, Colección de cantes flamencos: recogidos y anotados por Demófilo (Sevilla: Signatura Ediciones, (1881) 1999), 285; Manuel Ríos Ruiz, De cantes y cantaores de Jerez (Madrid: Editorial Cinterco, 1989), 42-43; Juan de la Plata, Los gitanos de Jérez: historias, dinastías, oficios y tradiciones ([Jerez de la Frontera]: Universidad de Cádiz, Cátedra de Flamencología, 2001), 121.

[8] Felipe Picatoste y Rodríguez, Diccionario popular de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Dirección y administración, 1882), 673.

[9] I propose these identifications based on the following: guitarist Curro de Maria, studying the guitarists' hands, helped me identify the rhythms and tonalities. With François Bernadi, I captured still photos from the Massine footage, which led me to realize there were two dancers in the film, staged in what seems to be a family setting, with two women, two men, and seven or eight children. The only photo of which I am aware that positively identifies María is that in Fernando el de Triana's Arte y artistas (75); Triana also included two photos of Juana (72 and 73, my Figure 1). The sisters often worked together as "Las Macarronas." In the Massine footage, one dancer has a distinctive facial shape, with very wide cheekbones. Comparing the two with known photos of Juana, such as that from the Kursaal published in ABC on March 27, 1921, and noting that the first dancer dances in two clips, while the second dancer, shot later in the day, dances in only one, led me to this conjecture. As part of my research, I have added a soundtrack of palmas and a visual box showing the counts to the first and third Macarrona clips, at both 50 percent and 100 percent speed (which is slowed slightly to compensate for the fewer frames per second in 1917 film technology). These modified clips will be available to view at the New York Library for the Performing Arts. Blas Vega, Los cafés cantantes de Madrid (1846-1936) (Madrid: Ediciones Guillermo Blázquez, 2006), 126-127, 258-259.

[10] I have written about this in my chapter "Jaleo de Jerez and Tumulte Noir: Primitivist Modernism and Cakewalk in Flamenco, 1902-1917," from Flamenco on the Global Stage: Historical, Critical and Theoretical Perspectives© 2015 Edited by K. Meira Goldberg, Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum and Michelle Heffner Hayes by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandpub.com.

[11] The jazz hands appear at timestamps 00:43 - 00:49 and 00:53 - 1:02 of the third filmed Macarrona segment. Juana Vargas (La Macarrona)-Antonio López Ramírez (Ramirito), NYPL Performing Arts Research Collections - Dance, * MGZIDF 4750.

[12] In Massine's footage, although there is always guitar accompaniment and palmas, or handclapping, there is no sign of a singer. In this era, women often sang and danced at the same time, and men often sang alante-at the front of the stage-in a solo recital format.

[13] In the New York Public Library's 1937 film of Massine and Tamara Toumanova dancing The Three-Cornered Hat with Col. W. de Basil's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the Chicago Opera House, Massine performs this gesture in his Farruca del Molinero, at 15:00 and again at 15:25, and again, after defeating the Corregidor, at 21:40. *MGZHB 12-1000, no. 291-293, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/dacd5830-e366-0130-d583-3c075448cc4b (accessed October 31, 2014). I am grateful to David Vaughn for introducing me to this film.

During the middle of the nineteenth century, changes in transportation and communication systems extended New York City’s geographic reach giving its cultural productions a truly national audience. Encouraging and promoting the development of this national literature were the native New Yorkers Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck (pronounced DIE-KINK.) Today, the contributions of the Duyckinck brothers to American literature are often overlooked; if the brothers are recognized at all, it is for editing the Cyclopedia of American Literature, a multi-volume work that includes biographies of major writers as well as excerpts of their work. However, during the nineteenth century these two editors were at the center of an expansive literary network. The Duyckinck family papers at the New York Public Library contain clues to how the brothers navigated the increasingly complicated and political literary scenes of the New York publishing industry and national print culture.

An Editor and a Publisher

Evert Duyckinck initially struggled to establish himself in the publishing world. While Wiley and Appleton freely entered into a contract for him to edit The Literary World, they broke the contract when Duyckinck hired his impetuous friend Cornelius Mathews to be a regular contributor to the weekly journal. Admittedly, Wiley and Appleton had some reasons to be displeased with Mathews. Wiley, with his partner George Putnam, had published one of Mathews’s books, Big Abel and the Little Manhattan, in the Library of American Books series, a series edited by Evert Duyckinck. Unfortunately, however, Mathews was unhappy with way this book was promoted. On Nov. 7, 1845, George Putnam wrote a letter to Evert reassuring him that the work was being treated with the same respect as any other book published by the house. In a letter dated Dec. 19, 1845, Putnam reminds Duyckinck of the publisher’s vested interest in the success of Mathews’s title, writing, “Mr. Mathews has always treated me with great courtesy & I have no motive whatever for any prejudice & want of good feeling towards him. Whether I admire his writings or not matters little—I should certainly be as glad as yourself to have them made as popular as the best of Dickens.” Despite Putnam’s investment in Mathews' success, the writer’s continuous complaints about the treatment of his poorly written and poorly received books earned him a rather negative reputation among the New York literati. It is understandable why Wiley and Appleton would want to distance themselves from him, but Evert Duyckinck did not believe that the publishers had any legal ground for breaking the contract they had signed with him. After exchanging various letters with Duyckinck, Wiley and Appleton hired C.J. Hoffman to edit The Literary World.

While Evert Duyckinck was struggling to retain control of The Literary World in 1847, he exchanged some particularly revealing letters with his brother, who was traveling in Europe. In a letter dated May 4, 1847, George congratulates Evert for producing such a quality journal, and expresses excitement that Cornelius Mathews will be writing for the paper. George also asks Evert about future publishing ventures, explaining a desire to enter this field. Upon hearing the unfortunate news that his brother was dismissed from his post, George writes:

"I need not tell you my dear brother that you have my full sympathy in this matter, but that is not enough....after so many failures, not one of them owing to yourself has greatly strengthened my conviction that if you are to reap the full reward of your talents and labors we must work together in some publishing scheme. I know the risks and do not want you to risk your property. I am somewhat differently situated and a loss would not be as serious a thing to me as to you….I should not be surprised to see the Lit. World in the market at the end of the year."

This letter underscores George’s insight into the publishing industry. He understood that his brother’s talents would flourish if he had the type of full editorial control owning a paper would secure. The Duyckinck brothers bought The Literary World in 1848, becoming both its publishers and editors.

A Rare Meeting Indeed

The Literary World was a unique publication in that it was the only weekly devoted exclusively to literature and the book trade. Owning this niche periodical gave the Duyckinck brothers substantial power in the publishing industry as their reviews were read by publishers and booksellers throughout the nation. Evert and George Duyckinck were so entrenched in New York print culture that they were able to use their considerable social capital to foster the development of others’ careers.

In fact, Evert Duyckinck was at the first meeting of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne on August 5, 1850 in western Massachusetts. In a series of letters, Evert Duyckinck describes his trip to his wife, Margaret. On August 3, 1850, he explains his plan to visit Nathaniel Hawthorne and climb Monument Mountain with Herman Melville, and on August 6, 1860, he provides a first-hand account of the hike and concludes that “...it was a rare meeting was it not.” This meeting is more fully described in the September 3, 2004 New York Times article “In Melville’s Footsteps.” While Joe Roman mentions Duyckinck twice, it is useful to see Duyckinck himself describe his experiences as it is important to consider how editors understood their own role. Duyckinck directly discussed his work as editor in a letter dated August 4, 1850, the day before the climb. He wrote:

"I have the proof sheets of Appleton's criticism of Wordsworth's...poem "The Prelude' with me to read & use at leisure in the paper. Mathews told me that Griswold was about to publish a whole book of it in his next week's magazine, so I concluded that my next week's paper should have its share & made up a parcel by mail with the necessary directions at once. So you see that the Literary World can be edited at a distance of 160 miles—so there need to be no obstacle to our settling here if you choose. And if you were here today I think the...sweetness of this mountain air would tempt you."<click here to see original letter>

In this passage, Duyckinck argues that editing is more about social connections than physical location. With information from specific colleagues and friends, Duyckinck is able to make decisions about what needs to be included in The Literary World from a considerable distance. In some ways, Duyckinck suggests that as an editor he himself is circulating with his texts.

The Duyckinck's literary salon was located at 20 Clinton Place, today's West 8th Street. The Duyckinck brothers gained prominence as editors in New York City, yet being at the center of the New York publishing world meant that they were also at the center of national print culture. New York City was the publishing capital of antebellum United States and the role that New Yorkers, such as the Duyckinck brothers, played in creating American literature is worth remembering. Fortunately, the New York Public Library's Manuscripts and Archives Division holds the Duyckinck family papers which allow us to develop a better appreciation of this family’s contribution to American letters.

The following titles on our Recent Acquisitions Display are just a few of our new books, which are available at the reference desk in the Dorot Jewish Division. Catalog entries for the books can be found by clicking on their covers. Thank you to Christopher Zhao for his help with this post.

Helen Levitt (American, 1913–2009), Untitled, ca.1940, gelatin silver print The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. © Estate of Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt was one of this century’s great photographers. Were I to say this about her great friend Walker Evans, it would seem like a tautology, rather like saying that Shakespeare was an important writer. Readers can judge for themselves why this should be the case, why one should need to say this about Helen.

In 2000 I was asked to write an introduction to Helen's book, Crosstown. It was among the best jobs—possibly the very best job—I’ve ever had. We were introduced by our mutual friend, the gifted photographer Judy Linn. Also Helen was an avid and serious reader, and another dear mutual friend, Richard Deveraux, who has worked for many years at the Strand bookstore, used to bring her my books. I was enormously flattered that she liked my work.

Every Sunday for several months I would climb the steps to the top-floor apartment on 12th Street where she lived with her cat, and we would look at her photos, going through her work in chronological order. No adjective is strong enough to convey the excitement of studying those images while Helen recalled the circumstances in which they were taken, and talked about photography in general. Year later I wrote a novel that included, among its characters, a photographer loosely based on Brassai. But much of what he says in my book were things I’d heard from Helen, statements that I could still hear, uttered with Helen’s utterly individual mixture of toughness, certitude, curiosity, and glee. “You have to do your legwork” was her typically terse and telling verdict on what it takes to be a street photographer.

The images in the library’s exhibition Public Eye are characteristic of what was so marvelous about her work. The deceptively effortless sense of composition, the bold diagonal at which the children cross the overgrown lot, the eloquent way in which each child’s individual self expresses itself in that child’s walk, in that child’s place in a line of children—even when we are seeing the children from behind. And oh, the gladiatorial drama of those boys re-enacting some mythic or Hollywood combat! Few photographers—few artists—have so gracefully conveyed their deep interest in, and respect for, the complication and the beauty that accrues to children simply by virtue of their being children. Few artists have demonstrated such compassion, such appreciation—and such a profound sense of amusement—for the sort of ordinary people who had the good fortune to be there when Helen Levitt was doing her legwork on their street.

Francine Prose is an acclaimed author of over three dozen works of nonfiction and fiction. Her most recent novel is Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.

Helen Levitt (American, 1913–2009), Untitled, ca.1940, gelatin silver print The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. © Estate of Helen Levitt