The Rumpus 2017 Holiday Gift Guide
We’ve gathered up our favorite gifting ideas this holiday season and put them together into one handy list!
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Posts Tagged: New York Public Library
Sound & Vision: Bob Egan
Allyson McCabe talks with Bob Egan, a man widely known as one of New York’s foremost “pop culture detectives,” about why and how he does the work he does.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Larissa MacFarquhar
Larissa MacFarquhar discusses her book Strangers Drowning, why she finds nonfiction so compelling, and how she gets inside the minds of her subjects.
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Sound & Vision: Arthur Fournier
Allyson McCabe talks with Arthur Fournier, an independent dealer of books, serials, manuscripts, and archives, about how he developed his niche, and how digital access has both enriched and complicated the work of archiving and collecting.
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The Rumpus 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
We’ve gathered up our favorite gifting ideas this holiday season and put them together into one handy list!
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
As Barnes & Noble prepares to leave Bronx, New York, an independent store is already being planned by the winner of New York Public Library’s New York StartUP! Business Competition. Only Prime Members receive Amazon’s insane discounts in the store’s physical locations. An upstate New York bookstore wins its battle to display anti-Trump signage. An […]
...moreReading in New York
At the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz writes about the New York Public Library’s newly renovated Rose Main Reading Room, which was closed for two and half years for restorations. “The room is one of the city’s great public spaces, a shared chamber devoted to private mental endeavors, and it’s looking good,” Schwartz says.
...moreLiving in the New York Public Library
For Atlas Obscura, Sarah Laskow delves into the secret apartments of the New York Public Library system. Most people only dream of living in a library, but for some people, this was reality. The apartments—which were in the Carnegie libraries—were branches of the New York Public Library. Unfortunately, they’re not much to look at anymore, but we […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview With Alejandro Zambra
Alejandro Zambra discusses his latest book, Multiple Choice, inspired by the Chilean exam administered to students seeking college admission
...moreThis Week in Posivibes: Arthur Russell
A new treatise on the importance of the genre-melting artist has been published by the New York Times, inspired by the New York Public Library’s acquisition of Arthur Russell’s archives. The acquisition itself is massive, sprawling, and difficult to catalogue, according to the NYT piece: [It] includes a thousand-or-so reels, cassettes, DATs, Beta and VHS tapes with hundreds […]
...moreA Library for Prisoners
Parsons School of Design students collaborated with the New York Public library to design better book carts to serve incarcerated readers. The carts are intended to facilitate easy browsing. The partnership has produced four carts that will be used at places like Rikers Island and the Manhattan Detention complex.
...moreThe Many Libraries of the New York Public Library
Not every library can be a grand palace. Consider for a moment the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library, a far less glamorous workhorse than the more famous cathedral of books located at Bryant Park. Over at the New Yorker, Ada Calhoun recounts her experiences in some of the smaller library branches around the […]
...moreErotica Illustrated
For Hyperallergic, Claire Voon tours the New York Public Library’s collection of historical erotica, ranging from 15th century illustrations of eroticized mythological scenes to risqué 19th century photographs kept safe by owners in the pages of their books.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Understanding our origins. The New York Public library is encouraging people to make video games. Thoreau’s world of death. Can drugs help us understand life?
...more180,000 High-Res Pictures Are Worth A Lot of Words
The New York Public Library has made 180,000 high-res images available for download, and they’re challenging the public to come up with creative new uses for old pictures.
...moreSylvia Plath’s Earliest Works
Gothamist was recently given permission to share some of Sylvia Plath’s earliest manuscripts in a video on their website. The manuscripts, which include drawings, some of her favorite poems, and her own original poetry, are held in a private collection at the New York Public Library and are only accessible by researchers who make an […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
The technological reinvention of the NYPL. The morality of Uber. All those times science took the supernatural seriously. The parables of Pavlov.
...moreLife Cycle of an Eyebrow Hair
Jezebel has complied pictures of the questions the staff at the New York Public Library had to answer in the pre-Google days.
...moreLearning Outside the Classroom
With the goal of “encouraging kids to become lifelong readers,” the Obama administration has teamed up with charities and publishers to offer digital books to children of low-income families. The books will be made available through an app developed with the help of the New York Public Library.
...moreThe Precarious State of the New York Public Library
In part, the crisis of The New York Public Library stems from the fact that it’s a weird entity. It’s not a state or city agency; instead, the library was founded as a private, nonprofit institution. It has always been governed by a board of trustees typically drawn from Manhattan’s 1 percent. NPR reviews Scott […]
...moreGhost Stories with Neil Gaiman
Vulture spent time with Neil Gaiman perusing the special collections of the New York Public Library, which includes early drafts of Frankenstein, engravings from William Blake, and Jack Kerouac’s blood stains.
...moreBooks about Books
In 2011, Phyllis Rose read every book on the LEQ-LES shelf in the New York Public Library and wrote about the experience in an essay collection called The Shelf. In doing so, Rose joined the long tradition of “bibliomemoirs”—a blend of autobiography and literary criticism. In the Guardian, Rachel Cooke examines this tradition and the […]
...moreA Book of One’s Own
Inspired by a reader’s powerful response to hir novel Roving Pack, Sassafras Lowrey teamed up with Hugh Ryan, founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, to curate the Queer Book Diorama Show, a collection of dioramas based on books that played a role in the development of their artists’ queer identities. The exhibition, currently […]
...moreHouse of Library Catalog Cards
The New York Public Library owns an absolutely peculiar collection: a 6000+ cards catalog of hand-typed children books reviews, written by librarians over the years. Lynn Lobash, NYPL reader services overseer, explained to Quartz that, “There’s about a billion card catalogs in the library, but these are special in that they were used as a […]
...moreNYPL Hosts Panel on Amazon
The continuing battle between Amazon and Hachette was the focus of a panel discussion hosted by the New York Public Library last week featuring novelist James Patterson, publisher Morgan Entrekin, literary agent Tina Bennett, and several political theorists. Jason Diamond has a writeup at Flavorwire: The takeaway from the event was this: the trouble Amazon causes […]
...moreThe Hippie Pack Rat on Display
A New York Times journalist recently got a sneak-peek at “roughly 170 linear feet of manuscripts, reporter’s notebooks, newspaper clippings, sketches and other materials” that will comprise an upcoming archive of Tom Wolfe’s work at the New York Public Library. Thanks to Wolfe’s pack rat tendencies, the archive will preserve not only his vision but also […]
...moreWhy Libraries Matter
Love libraries? So do we. Know someone who thinks physical libraries will eventually disappear? Have them watch this mini-documentary, Why Libraries Matter, over at the Atlantic. A look at a day in the life of New York City’s public libraries reveals the many reasons people use libraries and why we shouldn’t let them disappear.
...moreWhy Children’s Books Matter
In a piece featured on the Paris Review’s website, Sadie Stein encourages readers to check out the New York Public Library’s exhibition “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter.” The exhibition features original sketches and manuscripts of beloved children’s books. All these characters are complex, somewhat insolent, defiant, desperate for attention and love, and […]
...moreGo to the Library Without Leaving Your House
If you liked learning about fore-edge paintings, you’ll love the New York Public Library’s Tumblr. And the Smithsonian Libraries’ Tumblr. And the University of Iowa’s Special Collections & University Archives Tumblr. And all the other library blogs linked in this MetaFilter post, which upload pictures of all kinds of nifty stuff from their stacks, from “the original […]
...moreF**king Sleep at the Library
“Motherfuckers are e-mailing me from China and shit,” Adam Mansbach said last night at the book launch party for his popular new bedtime story for parents, Go the Fuck to Sleep, held at the New York Public Library. Mansbach told the audience that due to high demand 400,000 copies have been printed (yesterday was the […]
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