Words on Pictures

  42nd Street entrance to NYPL Central Bldg. where Central Circulation was located in the now named Celeste Bartos Forum. (top left)   Berenice Abbott's  Tempo of the City: II, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, Looking west from Seymour Building, 503 Fifth Avenue. 1937. Changing New York . NYPL Wallach Photography Collection.   Location, Location, Location: The NYPL Picture Collection as a Midtown Nexus The Picture Collection’s location at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue put it at the center of a mid‑20th‑century image machine. Within a short walk were nearly all the industries that produced, circulated, and monetized images: newspapers and magazines, publishers, fashion houses and garment manufacturers, film and theatre studios, radio and later television networks, advertising agencies, and department stores. That geography is not incidental. It explains why the Picture Collection became, in Romana Javitz’s phrase, a “giant encyclopedia where pictures are consulted i...

Marion . Subject heading: Curiosity. engraving, ca. 1850. Stahlstich v. Carl Mayer’s Kunst-Anstalt in Nürnberg. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. Curious? For the nominal cost of $4.99 you can get the ebook Words on Pictures: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library's Picture Collection.  Covering the years 1916 to 1965, Words on Pictures is an excellent resource for the study of the use and dissemination of printed visual resources during of the age of photo-mechanical reproduction.   The story of the Picture Collection cannot be told without the story of Romana Javitz (1903-1980) who was head of the Picture Collection from 1928-1968. A pioneering librarian whose career spans the rise of print media, cinema and the mass circulation of illustrated magazines and newspapers across the globe. In three interviews included in the publication Javitz reveals a mastery of the semantics of...