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Words on Pictures

The Organization of Vision: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection

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Romana Javitz. ca. 1942. Trude Fleischmann. Private collectio n. Origins: an immigrant, an art student, and an “untrained” librarian Romana Javitz was born in Russia in 1903 to Polish parents and immigrated to New York as a child. Her family settled in the Bronx and on the Upper West Side; her mother was a hat milliner and her father an importer of fine woods, giving the family a modest middle‑class footing and daily contact with materials, texture, and craft. This background – immigrant and artisanal at once – matters for understanding her later commitments: she instinctively took seriously both “high” art and the visual culture of ordinary life and work (Worth Beyond Words, pp. 6–7; Words on Pictures , passim). She entered the New York Public Library young, first in the Children’s Room (1919), then part‑time in the Picture Collection (from 1924), while studying painting at the Art Students League rather than library science ( Worth Beyond Words ... , p. 6; Staff News Appendix, p. 161...
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A Longitudinal Study: The Annual Reports of the New York Public Library's Picture Collection

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Romana Javitz in the Picture Collection. 1950s. The Annual Reports of the New York Public Library Picture Collection,  and published  from roughly 1916 to the late 1950s, offer a surprisingly rich body of evidence for study and analysis. They are not merely internal memos; read together, they form a longitudinal study of how visual culture, user communities, and the economics of pictures changed over half a century. Several kinds of analysis are possible. Note: See also recently digitized Unfilled Calls, 1925-1928 from internal Picture Collection records.  1. Growth, Scale, and Structural Limits The most obvious thread is quantitative: the rapid expansion of both stock and circulation, and the tension between demand and infrastructure. Stock growth • 1929: 222,828 classified pictures.   • 1934: 456,588 pictures (almost doubled in five years).   • 1936: 625,668 pictures.   • 1939: 877,405 pictures.   • 1943: 1,058,611 pictures.   • 194...
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