Art & Photography

The New York Public Library's collection of nearly three hundred Western European illuminated manuscripts is one of the largest in America but also one that is very little known. Dating from the turn of the tenth century unto well into the period of the Renaissance, these works give vivid testimony to the creative impulses of the often nameless craftsmen who discovered ever-new ways of animating the contents of hand-produced books through inventive and sometimes exuberant manipulations of all the elements of the book: form and format, layout, script, decoration, illustration, and binding. To introduce this magnificent collection and many of its most important works to scholars and the 

This small illustrated book elaborates not only on the "great artistic collaboration" that created The New York Public Library's magnificent flagship building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, but also on the cultural and historical influences on its architecture. Among the topics discussed by the author, an architectural historian, are the ornamentation of the Fifth Avenue facade, decorative motifs within the building, the murals on the first and third floors, and many other points about which Library tour leaders are questioned every day. The book is structured so that visitors may use it to guide themselves around the building for a leisurely exploration. The illustrations 

This companion volume to the exhibition on view at the Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library features essays by the distinguished editors as well as by Alain Touraine, J. C. Davis, Krishan Kumar, and other leading European and American scholars of utopian thought and literature. Elegantly designed and richly illustrated with over 300 images from the collections of The New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this book explores the long tradition in thought and art envisioning the "perfect place," from classical antiquity to the present. Also included are an extensive bibliography of utopian literature, a bibliography of secondary 

A celebration of the work of one of America's greatest nineteenth-century draughtsmen, this illustrated volume explores the achievement of F.O.C. Darley, illustrator of works by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the popularizer of such national types as the Pilgrim, the Pioneer, the patriotic Minuteman, and the canny Yankee Peddler. In style and subject matter, Darley's work ranges from the earthy realism and humor of his early illustrations for popular fiction through the heroic grandeur of the large engravings of historical subjects and the deluxe editions of his later career. Many of these compositions are closely