Blog Posts by Subject: Magazines, Journals and Serials

Final Week of National Poetry Month

Reader’s Den friends, we’ve come to the fourth and final installment of our month-long celebration of verse. I give you a poem from fellow New Yorker Don Marquis, originally published in 1915. Check out discussion questions after the break, and post comments!

Working as an archivist I often come across collection items that change the way I see the world around me. I had such an experience recently when processing a manuscript collection. As I sorted through the papers of a woman who had donated her papers to the library, an article title caught my eye, “Is Feminism Dead?”

Those who are interested in the Feminist movement will remember the Time magazine cover from 1998 that asked this question, featuring the images of four women across a stark black background: Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and…Ally McBeal. The lead article by Ginia Bellafante chastised the newest generation of women for 

Want to know when a journal’s first issue was published? What that issue # 1 looked like? Need to track down the editor for those impossible to find back issues? Discover what new titles are missing from the collection?

Premiere Issues: An Archive of Magazine Firsts answers these questions and many more that persistently plague serials librarians. The site’s mission “to provide a home for those first issues to live, be read and shared by an international audience,” was begun in 2002 by Danielle Huthart and is a growing collection of 200 or so issues. Included are the often beautiful covers (Huthart’s concentration is art, fashion, design, and 

On quitting his classes at Harvard in 1927, Edwin Land moved to New York and became a regular user of the library’s Science Division. His goal: the manufacture of a polarizing light filter, the basic idea behind Polaroid sunglasses. Between the library and a variety of makeshift labs, he eventually figured out how to embed microscopic crystals of “herapathite” in molten sheets of plastic and align them all in one direction. He named the invention Polaroid, and used the name again when he invented his instant photography. Land had discovered the identity of the crucial polarizing crystal while reading an 1852 article by the British doctor-scientist William Herapath, 

What better way to kick off your election night then an evening in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room – relax, listen to great new writers introduced by their editors, join us for a glass of wine afterward, all still with plenty of time to catch the election results. The line up begins with Editor Thaddeus Rutkowski (Many Mountains Moving) introducing fiction writer Jon Swan, followed by Levi Rubeck (Washington Square) introducing poet Elisa Gabbert and wrapping up with Michael Vazquez (Bidoun) introducing non fiction writer Anand Balakrishnan. Periodically Speaking showcases NYPL’s great collection of contemporary literary magazines. Lots of librarians have worked on 

Literary magazine aficionados, myself included, will meet up in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room at HSSL as Periodically Speaking returns on Tuesday, October 14th. It’s a thrill to begin our 4th season hosting the series, which aims to connect editors, writers, readers, librarians, and lovers of literature & lit mags with each other, and the Library’s one-of-a-kind collection. Each evening highlights three periodicals, with editors of each introducing an emerging writer. The cool thing to me about Periodically Speaking is that not only do you get to hear some wonderful new literary voices and editor’s talk about their journals (which I love!) but that it