Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

In celebration of the National Day of Listening, the Art and Picture Collections have been collaborating with StoryCorps to produce an all-day drop-in event to consider your art and your life.

We invited six artists to the StoryCorps booth to record the story of art in their lives. And, on the National Day of Listening (the day after Thanksgiving), we will hear excerpts from their tales as we look at images from their oeuvre. The artists will participate in a panel discussion about their StoryCorps experiences, while the audience will be invited to share what art means in their personal lives. And StoryCorps representatives will be on hand to explain how to record and document your own story.

Artists Michael Cline, Annette Cords, Anujan Ezhikode, Builder Levy, Justin Lieberman, and Charles Mingus III each traveled with a significant other to the StoryCorps booth in Foley Square to be interviewed about how art has influenced, molded, and changed their lives. Their stories were recorded by StoryCorps and will be archived in the Library of Congress, where their lives can be celebrated through the art of listening for years to come.

Excerpts from the recording session will be played throughout the day on November 27. As a bonus, join us at 2 pm for an artist panel, where they will share their stories and their recording experiences in person at NYPL for the National Day of Listening, a day to slow down and listen to the stories of the people in your life. We are also looking forward to hearing your stories in art. Whether you create doodles, mashups, crochet, or marble sculpture, we want to listen to where they come from.

When: Friday, November 27, 2009, 10 am to 5 pm
Where: South Court Auditorium, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, 42nd Street & 5th Avenue

Schedule:
10 am Artist storytelling slideshow, followed by audience interviews
12 noon Artist storytelling slideshow, followed by audience interviews
2:15 pm Artist panel (arrive at 2pm to hear the artists in person), moderated by Arezoo Moseni
3:45 pm Artist storytelling slideshow, followed by audience interviews

We are really grateful to the wonderful folks at StoryCorps for making this event possible. Please join us and listen to the stories of six contemporary artists, and tell the story of what art means to your life.

Over the years, as we push more and more of our maps onto the web, such as Pieter Goos' Zee-Atlas, 1672, from which the below image was taken, we ask…
...what do we do with all this stuff?
...how do we make digital maps meaningful?

One approach is through our blog, where we highlight various places and themes depicted. Often there is much more to read between the contours, about, among other things the social, geographic and cultural mix from where the maps were generated; something we, in future posts, will take the time to illuminate.

Another approach to extend the reach, utility and meaningfulness of our maps is through digital geographic indexing. Our staff has thus far created map indexes for close to 1/3 of our 10,000 digitized maps, which you can read about here and download here, in effect opening an opportunity for readers to access our collections geographically.

And while schematic and geographic indexes serve a much needed function, they merely point to the next logical steps in the presentation and re-purposing of map images in a web context.

The first step is placing the maps themselves (as opposed to outlines of the map coverages) into geographic context, or put another way, turning pictures of maps into digital geospatial information, where a pixel can be read by a computer as a pair of coordinates, as latitude and longitude.

These images can then, in turn, be rendered using tools such as web map servers and the ubiquitous Google Earth. The image below is Plate 1 from William Perris' Maps of the City of New York, 1852, georectified and then rendered in Google Earth.

Stay tuned. In my next post I'll go the details about how we "stretch" maps for web presentation. We will also explain how you too can participate.

Staff of the New York Public Library recently hand picked a set of nearly 500 images, collected from across our Digital Gallery, composing them as a curated set of images at the Commons on Flickr. They represent the Hudson River Valley through several hundred years of history and complement Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009, now up in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The images depict landscape scenes in stereoscopic vision, a popular 19th century format; everyday and commemorative menus from restaurants and catering halls; postcards of scenic places and buildings; and engravings of important estates, prominent citizens and dramatic turning points in historical events. These images have been geocoded and are part of map-based bibliography, The Storied River, coming soon to the NYPL. Stay tuned, the launch will be posted on the NYPL's map blog...

In the meantime, enjoy the same photos at the Commons on Flickr, perused as a gallery of images... Mapping New York's Shoreline: The Storied River

...or, my favorite, pinned to a map on the Flickr website.

Learn more about the NYPL Map Division.

This weekend is a big one for yarn lovers, knitters, and crocheters—there’s both a Handmade Crafternoon devoted to knitting and crochet, and there’s also a weekend-long Yarn Crawl that’ll take you all over the city! Here are the details on both events:

About the next Handmade Crafternoon:
Date and time: Saturday, October 10th, from 2:00 to 4:00pm
Location: Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
42nd Street and Fifth Avenue
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum (Room #227, located in the northeast corner of the second floor)

We’ll have these three special guests, talking about art, wool, and what they do:
Sabrina Gschwandtner, author of KnitKnit
Teva Durham, author of Loop-d-Loop and Loop-d-Loop Crochet
Annie Modesitt, author of Romantic Hand Knits, Men Who Knit and the Dogs Who Love Them and more

If you’re in the middle of a project, bring it with you so that we can all stitch together. And if you are curious about learning to knit or crochet, we’ll lend you some supplies for the afternoon and help you to get started. I’ll have stacks of vintage knitting and crochet books and magazines to look through—think glamorous World War II styles and Mad Men-esque dresses and sweaters too. And just like last month, we’ll have a fundraising raffle too. So come and join the fun!

About the New York City Yarn Crawl:
What’s this Yarn Crawl, you ask? It’s a full roster of events and specials at yarn shops all over the city, and it runs from Friday the 9th through Monday the 12th. There’s plenty to do—including raffles and a scavenger hunt--so check out the site and plot your route!

You might remember from previous posts, that the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division has been busy digitizing our historical map collections, with a strong focus on New York City fire insurance maps. We’ve added some excellent new titles (about 500 maps total) to that collection in recent months detailing Queens and Brooklyn from the early 20th century. The example below is from E. Belcher Hyde’s Atlas of the Borough of Brooklyn, Vol. 7., 1907. This map shows an early Luna Park, Coney Island’s famous amusement park, just four years after it opened to the public, which itself was built on the site of the former Sea Lion Park, home of the world’s first looping roller coaster. And you thought the Cyclone was scary.

Richard Wilbur published his first poem, "Puppies" in 1929 in the children's magazine John Martin’s Book at the age of 8. In the eighty years since, Wilbur, Poet Laureate from 1987-1988, has won the Pulitzer Prize twice and outlived more famous poet contemporaries like John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. These poets' Confessional style caught fire mid-century and signalled a departure from the measured poetry Wilbur was writing. A Wilbur poem foregoes the stormy revalations of the Confessionalists; more often it betrays instead the delight and solace to be found in the things of this world (not for nothing the name of Wilbur's National Book Award-winning third collection). Today he is widely recognized today as a master of the form, a spinner of traditionally-crafted verse both as strong and subtle as silk.

Wilbur is a talented assembler of images. As a case study, observe how Wilbur evokes dusk in three very different poems: "Cicadas," "As it Is" and "Leaving". The poems exult in rituals both bucolic and urban: a chorus of crickets nestled in leaves with "thick-tongues" break open a still summer night; a city bus ferries passengers hovering over their crossword puzzles through dark streets to their homes; and at a garden party, the tilting shadows of guests saying their goodbyes fade in honeyed light.

Wilbur's poetry can be acrobatic; the lines simultaneously restrained and soaring. He writes in verse, but so effortlessly that the reader may not always notice that his lines follow a formal meter. His poetry calls to mind the horsepower and dazzle of a Shawn Johnson balance beam routine: at moments heart-stopping, but with the quiet technical precision required of a narrow run that demands flawlessness. To read Wilbur is to see the world differently, and to appreciate the rhythms and power imposed by meter. Take the new poem, “The House” , printed in a recent issue of the New Yorker. As with many a Wilbur poem, the narrator explores the liminal state between sleep and consciousness. Here, the "I" of the poem tenderly imagines his lover's dream visions of a white house, and wonders whether she has yet arrived. The poem achieves added poignancy when turning to Wilbur's own life and to to the recent passing of his wife of 65 years, Charlotte Ward Wilbur, in 2007.

Wilbur is a poet that I’ve come to read only recently, in the process of cataloguing a collection of his works acquired from bookseller and bibliophile Robert A. Wilson (1922-), the former proprietor of the Phoenix Book Shop. Virtually all of the Henry A. and Albert W. Berg Collection's printed Richard Wilbur material is inscribed from Wilbur to his friend Bob Wilson.

Wilson took over the Phoenix at 18 Cornelia Street (later relocated to 22 Jones Street) in 1962, after retiring from a position as office manager at a cuckoo clock factory, and remained there until it closed in 1988. The Phoenix was one of those treasure-rich New York Bookstores frequented and beloved by neighborhood writers living in Greenwich Village, and those like Wilbur who traveled greater distances. Regular customers included Marianne Moore, Edward Albee, Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, Alice B. Toklas, and William S. Burroughs (who inscribed the guestbook with one of his cut-ups). The poet Diane de Prima sometimes worked the counter. Wilson nurtured relationships with his famous customers and published some of their work himself in small editions of poetry under the Phoenix imprint, the Oblong Octavo Series, which he sold at the store. The New York Public Library has Oblong Octavo editions of poems by Amiri Baraka, Galway Kinnell, James Merrill, and Louis Zukovsky, among others.

For Wilson's own account of his tenure at the Phoenix Book Shop, check out Seeing Shelley Plain (in addition to anecdotes about Moore, Toklas, Pound and others, you'll meet a pair of saber-tooth tigers originally introduced to Wilson by the novelist Glenway Wescott). The Phoenix was enough of a fixture in New York to spur the poet Robert Bly to publish his playful "Pheenix Book Shop List No. 69-Association Items", a tongue-in-cheek list of imagined realia hawked by the store. Bly's list includes an envelope of Tennessee William's moustache clippings and a pork chop bone nibbled on by Allen Ginsberg.

A good place to start with Richard Wilbur's poetry is his Collected Poems, 1943-2004. Wilbur is also an acclaimed translator of Voltaire, Moliere and Racine. In 1956 the libretto he wrote for Leonard Bernstein's comic-opera version of Candide was produced on Broadway. Wilbur's copy of the Random House edition of the operetta inscribed to Wilson will be on display in the New York Public Library's upcoming exhibition, "Candide at 250: Scandal and Success", opening on October 23.

Photo of Robert Wilson by Christopher P. Stephens - September 1979

Interested in quilts, handmade clothes, and what goes into the work of fabric and pattern design? Then mark your calendars to come to December’s Handmade: Crafternoon and meet some modern women of craft who work wonders with textiles.

Heather Ross, author of Weekend Sewing; Denyse Schmidt, author of Denyse Schmidt Quilts; and Liesl Gibson of Oliver + S, will all be on hand to talk about their creative work. And as usual, we’ll have lots of Library books to look at, as well as a spread of materials on hand so you can get started stitching if you wish.

Here are the details:

Date and time:
Saturday, December 12, 2009, from 2:00 to 4:00pm

Location:
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
42nd Street and Fifth Avenue
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum (Room #227, located in the northeast corner of the second floor)

Question? Please leave it as a comment! Maura and I look forward to seeing you on the 12th!

November’s Handmade: Crafternoon will be all about paper and books! And really, is there anything better? If you’d like to try your hand at some basic book making (both sewn bindings and not), origami, or other paper-based creations, please come along! Our special guest will be artist and maker Mike Perry, who will share his creative expertise on this fun afternoon. We’ll have lots of supplies on hand to share so that you can make your own handmade book!

Here are the details:

Date and time:
Saturday, November 14th, from 2:00 to 4:00pm

Location:
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
42nd Street and Fifth Avenue
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum (Room #227, located in the northeast corner of the second floor)

Remember—it’s FREE, and there’s no advance registration required.
Question? Please leave it as a comment! Maura and I look forward to seeing you on the 14th!

Update (11/11/09): It turns out that we'll have one special guest on this afternoon--the amazing artist and maker Mike Perry. Grace Bonney cannot join us, but she promises to come out for another crafternoon in the future!

Alvaro Fernandez, co-founder and CEO of SharpBrains and co-author (with Elkhonon Goldberg) of The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness: 18 Interviews with Scientists, Practical Advice, and Product Reviews to Keep your Brain Sharp will be discussing the growing field of research in this area at two NYPL locations this coming week: Wednesday, September 23, 10 A.M. at Bronx Library Center, 310 East Kingsbridge Road; and, Friday, September 25, 1:30 P.M. at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. By presenting the results gleaned from recent research and scientific studies, Fernandez aims to help us make informed decisions about brain health and cognitive fitness.

In partnership with the local chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, The Library recently held three film screenings/discussions focused on Alzheimer’s disease. One thing I learned is that there is no known way to prevent or delay Alzheimer’s disease: no “gold standard.” On the other hand, based on evidence we can say that engaging in mentally stimulating activities through education, jobs, and leisure activities lowers the probability of developing Alzheimer’s symptoms. And for some reason, the building up of a Brain Reserve helps people, even with the same Alzheimer's pathology (which cannot be delayed/ prevented), to withstand the effects of that pathology and to delay the appearance of symptoms.

I asked Alvaro for a few books he would recommend on the topic of brain fitness. Here are some of his suggestions and comments:

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, by John J. Medina, “A fun and accessible overview of the research and implications, written with a younger/ business audience in mind"; A User’s Guide to the Brain, by John J. Ratey. “An excellent introduction to how the brain works and important concepts such as perception, cognition, attention, emotions.”

He also recommended a few websites- Cognitive Daily and Mind Hacks.

For more about Alvaro and SharpBrains, see my earlier post here.

I hope you can join us for Alvaro’s *free* presentation—your brain will thank you for it!

Maura and I hope that you had as much fun as we did at our inaugural Handmade: Crafternoon last weekend! If you would like another chance to meet fellow crafty library-goers, see books and magazines from the Library’s collection, and try out new creative skills, please join us for our next Handmade: Crafternoon in October.

On Saturday, October 10th, Sabrina Gschwandtner, author of KnitKnit, and Teva Durham, author of Loop-d-Loop and Loop-d-Loop Crochet, will be our special guests, and they’ve promised to share some purls of wisdom and knitty-gritty yarns about their crafting experience. We’ll have some hooks, needles, and yarn at hand to share that day, if you want to learn the basics. And feel free to bring along your own wooly work-in-progress or a project that you plan to start. That way we can all knitalong together! And of course I’ll have stacks of old knitting and crochet magazines from the Library’s collections to share—think glamourous World War II styles, and Mad Men-esque dresses and sweaters too.

Here are the details:

Date and time:
Saturday, October 10th, from 2:00 to 4:00pm

Location:
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
42nd Street and Fifth Avenue
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum (Room #227, located in the northeast corner of the second floor)

Remember—it’s FREE, and there’s no advance registration required.
Questions? Please leave it as a comment! Maura and I look forward to seeing you on the 10th!

Hopefully those of you living in New York City were able to participate in Primary Day; if you haven’t, it’s not too late. Registered voters have until 9:00 this evening. Of course, we all care about our city and want to take part in electing our public officials. Perhaps this morning you were overwhelmed by the number of candidates to research and decide between. According to the New York City Campaign Finance Board, as of September 10, 2009 there were a total of 374 candidates running for election!

Still, New Yorkers have been given materials to be informed: The New York City Campaign Finance Board (CFB) reported that more than 2.7 million households will receive the official New York City Voter Guide for the 2009 Primary elections in various languages. Perhaps you received one by mail recently. If you haven’t looked it over yet, it is very helpful.

For the increasing number of voters seeking voting information online, the CFB posts an interactive voter guide on its website. Voters can enter their address to view a guide tailored to their home district, or simply browse candidate profiles by name or office. Links allow visitors to e-mail campaigns and view PDFs of the guide in Spanish, Chinese, and Korean as well as other sites of interest.

The Milstein Division is presently collecting campaign ads and brochures from all parties, candidates, and offices, especially for the upcoming November 3rd Election. This will be added to our ephemera collection, useful for present day and future researchers. Most of what we have so far for the 2009 elections is, understandably, material from Democrats running in the primaries.

As the November 3rd Election moves near, anyone who wishes to contribute material, please send to:

Milstein Division of United States History, Local History & Genealogy
Stephen A. Schwarzman Bldg. – Rm 121
New York Public Library
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
New York, NY 10018

This post was contributed by Jim Falconi of the Milstein Division.

Today's big news around the Library? Our newly expanded hours at a number of locations across the city, including my own home base, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, and the Mid-Manhattan Library right across the street. (Check out this announcement for all of the details.)

What does this mean for curious crafters? If your craft inclinations lean to the vintage and historic, then you are in luck, because the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, with its rich research collections of vintage knitting, sewing, and handicraft books and magazines, is expanding its hours. You'll have more time to find the perfect pattern, picture, or information to inspire you in your work.

And if you like to browse through new craft books, then head to the Mid-Manhattan Library. There, you now have hours and hours in the evenings to browse through the craft books and select the ones that you want to borrow. This location's a great source for all sorts of new handicraft titles. And today it's also a great source for free doughnuts, too! The Cover-to-Cover Cafe, a pop-up snack spot there, is giving out free and fortifying Tim Horton treats until 11:00pm tonight.

So grab a doughnut and hit the stacks, crafters!

These three images are all from an 1891 facsimile of a lacework pattern book first printed in 1598 called Nouveaux pourtraicts de pointe coupé et dantelles en petite, moyenne et grande forme.

I can imagine these lovely and elegant geometric patterns re-used in many ways: embossed on card stock, made into sunprints, and perhaps even stitched onto paper using the pierced and embroidered technique that we’ll be learning at Handmade: Crafternoon on Sept. 12th. How can you imagine incorporating these into new works?

On Saturday, September 12th, Maura Madden (author of Crafternoon) and I will kick off our Handmade: Crafternoon series, and we hope that you can join us. This crafty gathering is free, and there’s no advance registration required. Here’s what’s in store for you that day:

Two special guests will join us and share their approaches to crafting with unusual and alternative materials. Jessica Vitkus (author of Alternacrafts) will show us how to make one-of-a-kind pierced and embroidered cards, and Hannah Rogge (author of Hardwear) will demonstrate how to turn stuff that you find in your toolbox and at the hardware store into unique jewelry.

We will have some materials on hand to share so that you can try your hand at these crafts. But if you would like to be sure to have what you need to make your own pair of hardware-inspired earrings, please bring with you:

• from the hardware store: 10 #8 flat washers
• from the craft store: 2 french earring wires

And if you happen to have embroidery floss and/or needle nose pliers to share with your fellow crafters, please bring them along!

We’ll have an inspiring spread of vintage books, magazines, and images from the Library’s collection to inspire you in your embroidery and jewelry making. And remember, the Library will be open from 11:00am until 6:00pm that day, so if you want to dig around in the collections you’ll have time to do so before and after the event! Here are the details on next week's Handmade: Crafternoon!

Date and time:
Saturday, September 12, 2009, from 2:00 to 4:00pm

Location:
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
42nd Street and Fifth Avenue
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum (Room #227, located in the northeast corner of the second floor)

Questions? Please leave it as a comment! See you on the 12th!

I’m often amazed by how paper sculptors--working with a practically two-dimensional material, and one that is treated as quite ephemeral--can create inventive and elegant sculptural forms. Artists whose work in paper I’ve been admiring quite a bit lately include Su Blackwell, who conjures complex literary scenes from book pages, and Yuken Teruya, whose tiny forest worlds created from discarded paper bags and rolls invite us to reconsider habits of consumption.

Would you like to investigate paper sculpture? The library has a number of mid-twentieth-century books that I like for the window they open into the medium’s use in advertising and window dressing as well as for the how-to projects they include. Two that I like in particular are Sculpture in Paper and Paper Sculpture, both of which are illustrated with commercial paper sculptures evocative of that period. And here (above and below) are a couple of pages from Paper Sculpture, in which author and sculptor Arthur Sadler shows you how to make an owl:

When reading family histories, as I often find myself doing in the Milstein Division, I frequently come across glowing depictions of people’s ancestors, of the grandmother who made the best peach cobbler this side of the Mississippi, or the aunt who was adored by all the neighborhood children and stray cats. For obvious reasons, less favorable descriptions of one’s family are not as common. Rarely do we come across stories of the egotistical great-grandfather or the lay-about uncle. Even rarer are those condemnations of whole branches of one’s family tree, as if one’s family passed down undesirable habits and traits generation after generation. Yet these are exactly the judgments that are transcribed in the research notes, or ‘Family Trait Files’, that were compiled for the Eugenics Records Office during the early decades of the last century.

Many months ago, I posted a piece about the valuable, but underused, collection of genealogical material in our division known as the Family Files. Among the myriad research notes, family newsletters, photographs, and miscellaneous material are a small number of files compiled by genealogists for submission to the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. It is in these files that, alongside notes on mother’s exceptional musical talent, we find accounts of the uncultivated, the “general no-counts” and various feeble-minded ancestors.

Eugenics, the theory that it is possible and desirable to improve future generations through selective breeding, gained its foothold in the United States at the laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor. The driving force behind the lab was Charles Davenport, one of the first and foremost proponents of the American eugenics movement. Davenport’s first studies dealt with physical traits like hair and eye color, yet his interests later shifted to the genetics of human traits that were not so easily quantifiable; for example, musical skill, sexual predilection and social behavior. This shift of focus was in part a response to similar studies going on in other countries. But it was also a direct reaction to the increasing concern of some segments of American society to the waves of immigration from Europe, and the shifts in the social and economic environment in the years leading up to World War II. Davenport tapped into the growing hysteria over the ‘foreign element’ and race relations to drum up support and funds for the creation of the Eugenics Records Office in hopes that in-depth study of the population would put the study of human traits on a firm, quantitative basis. He developed questionnaires that were taken from door-to-door by trained workers who recorded the characteristics of individuals from the interviewed family, a few of which made it into our family files at the library.  read more »

Calling all craft-loving, library-loving readers! Please join me and my co-host Maura Madden (author of the amazing guide to crafty gatherings, Crafternoon) for a new FREE monthly series called Handmade: Crafternoons! Each day we'll focus on a different handmaking theme, and I'll post details about them here on the blog in advance of the date.

What's in store for you at a Handmade: Crafternoon? Each event will include an inspiring spread of books and magazines (especially vintage books like the one pictured) from the Library's collections, a hands-on DIY project, and special crafty guests. It'll be a chance to get inspired at your Library, to hang with fellow crafty New Yorkers, and to make stuff together.

Interested? Then mark your calendars! Here are the dates:
Saturday, September 12, 2:00 to 4:00pm
Saturday, October 10, 2:00 to 4:00pm
Saturday, November 14, 2:00 to 4:00pm
Saturday, December 12, 2:00 to 4:00pm

These events will all take place at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at 42nd Street & Fifth Avenue. Yes, that's the big one with the lions out front. Maura and I hope to see you there!

This past Saturday I taught The Craft of the Book and, as usual, I had a great time meeting attendees and learning what brings them to the Library. My classes always include a little spread of books from the Library’s collection to give people a peek at what we offer. And below, as requested by a few of the students, I have listed the books shown that day (with links to the Catalog records for each). Thanks for coming!

Paper cutting by Annye Allison

Catalog 25; type faces, border designs, typecast ornaments, brass rule, superior specialties, machines and materials, cabinet equipment by Barnhart Brothers & Spindler

The world of the book by Des Cowley and Clare Williamson

An abridged specimen of printing types made at Bruce's New-York type-foundry by George Bruce’s Son & Co.

Papermaking for printmakers by Elspeth Lamb

Artists' books : a critical anthology and sourcebook, edited by Joan Lyons

Making books by hand : a step-by-step guide by Mary McCarthy and Philip Manna

Made with FontFont : type for independent minds, edited by Jan Middendorp and Erik Spiekermann

Exploring typography by Tova Rabinowitz

Book typography by Ari Rafaeli

Paper silhouettes by Mildred Swannell

Wood type by William H. Page & Co.

Are you caring for someone with Alzheimer’s Disease? Or perhaps you are watching a loved one who seems to be developing symptoms, and you wonder what the future holds?

HBO Documentary Films recently produced a 4-part film series entitled The Alzheimer’s Project (you can stream the videos from the link). I borrowed all the films and spent an evening watching them at home, wanting to immerse myself totally in the experience.

Wow.

Rather than leaving me sad or depressed, the films filled me with a greater appreciation for those who are touched by this disease, and something of an understanding of how they get through its phases--with humor, warmth, and love. The overview of cutting-edge research being done on Alzheimer’s gives us good reasons for hope, and practical advice that may curb our own likelihood of developing it. The producer of the series, John Hoffman, states in The Huffington Post that through the experience of making the series he lost his own fear of developing the disease, which had killed his own father ten years ago.

To participate in HBO’s mission of getting people talking about the disease—sharing information with each other about their experiences as well as hearing from scientists working in the area—the Library is partnering with the NYC chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association to host screenings of three of the films followed by moderated discussions. The kickoff will be Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 3:00 P.M. when the Caregivers segment will be screened, followed by a discussion led by Della Frazier-Rios, R.N., M.S., Senior Vice President and Director of Education & Outreach of the NYC Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association.

The following two screenings will be parts 1 and 2 of Momentum in Science, which provide a state-of-the-science report and take viewers inside the laboratories and clinics of 24 leading scientists and physicians working in the area of Alzheimer’s Disease research and practice. We are honored that the series producer John Hoffman, Vice President, HBO Documentary agreed to lead the discussion for part 1 which will be screened Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 3 P.M. He will be joined by Matt Kudish, M.S.W., Director of Helpline and Care Consultation for the Alzheimer’s Association’s NYC chapter.

The last screening, Momentum in Science, Part 2, will be followed by a discussion led by the esteemed Scott A. Small, M.D., Columbia University, whose work is profiled in the film. He will be joined by Stephanie Aragon, Coordinator, 24-hour Helpline, Alzheimer’s Association’s NYC chapter.

No-one should have to go through this experience alone. The Alzheimer’s Association provides an amazing range of support services for those with Alzheimer’s and caregivers, and the speakers the local chapter is presenting for each of the screenings will field questions you may have about where to turn for help in New York City.

I hope you can join the conversation with us—as John Hoffman said in his blog post referenced above, the more he learns, the less frightening Alzheimer’s becomes. . .

All screenings will be held at the South Court Auditorium of the landmark Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

It might be summer, but at the Library class is in session--craft of the book class, that is. If you would like to learn more about hand-press era bookmaking, come to the Library Saturday afternoon for an illustrated talk on the craftsmanship of paper making, printing, and bookbinding. And I'll have some books from the collection to share too. It's a free class, and you don't need to register. And attendees get to take home a handy guide to the subject (pictured above, atop a great wood type specimen book that I'll have to share too!). This guide doubles as a model for a quick and easy bookmaking structure that you can make at home anytime!

Saturday, July 25th, 2:00 to 3:00pm (classroom will open at 1:45pm)
New York Public Library
Celeste Bartos Education Center
First Floor, South Court Classrooms
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street

One last note: I'll teach this class once more this summer (at 2:00pm on August 22nd), so you can come then if you are interested but can't make it this weekend.