Posts by Jay Vissers

While looking through the "Personalities" reference files in the Picture Collection, I happened across this official portrait of a proud, confident man in a tightly-buttoned uniform with waist sash and epaulettes.

This is one of my favorite images from the million and a half items held by the NYPL’s Picture Collection. Of course, I haven’t seen them all, and if you ask my co-workers they’ll tell you that I usually work with pictures about ships, airplanes, battles and weird animals like bats, insects and snakes. But this image really stirs me. Every few months I take it from its folder (labeled FAMILY LIFE – 1950s) and revisit it to remind me of the evocative power of art from another time. This picture stands for all the reasons we save it and other pictures for the public to use and enjoy.

It’s an illustration from an elementary school level reading book, and it shows a 

I live for the day when some person who’s regarded as an arbiter of cultural taste is asked to name their favorite books. “I know you’re expecting an answer like Moby Dick, Don Quixote, Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, but, truth be told, the one story that really sums up the human condition for me is issue number 55 of The Amazing Spider-Man.” They then proceed to deliver a literate, succinct defense of their preference which would do credit to an Oxford professor’s deconstruction of Beowulf. I know this might sound weird, but then I also hope for the day when the consumers of culture, and not a coterie of critics, decide 

When I was a kid, I knew that grown-ups used big words with meanings I didn’t understand. There was always the assumption that as I got older, I’d learn these as a matter of course. In the meantime, however, I could always make up definitions based on other words I knew that sounded like the new one. Some of them still stick with me because, in my opinion, they’re better than the real things. For example…

I heard that someone had “matriculated”. This is a rather pompous way of saying that he or she had signed up for college, but I didn’t know that. So, what did it sound like. The main elements seemed to be 

There is a saying that some of the most precious moments in our lives are special just because we didn’t know that they were important at that time.

I mention this because for the past few weeks I’ve been experiencing a resurgence of interest in the topic of famous fires, a subject that has fascinated and haunted me ever since I happened across a book on the topic at the library at MacDill Air Force Base (Tampa, Florida) when I was eleven years old. I remember sitting in the aisle between the shelves, utterly spellbound by black and white photos of the aftermaths of great conflagrations. There I learned for the first time about the Iroquois Theater in Chicago (1903),