Since its founding in 1895, The New York Public Library has issued a wide variety of titles and publications as a way of publicizing its collections and services and making its unique materials known to audiences nationwide. Many of these titles are published directly by the Library, while others are published in cooperation with commercial publishers. The earnings from these publications contribute to the support of the Library's collections. This site includes all NYPL publications currently in print and available. In the complete list, publications are listed alphabetically by title within subject categories. Titles published by the Library are available at wholesale discounts through the Publications Office. Retail purchases can be made through The Library Shop.

Books are hardcover unless otherwise noted.

Just Published

Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City

Edited by Stephen C. Pinson

Eminent Domain features selections from recent photographic projects by five contemporary New York-based photographers: Thomas Holton's The Lams of Ludlow Street; Bettina Johae's borough edges, nyc; Reiner Leist's Window; Zoe Leonard's Analogue; and Ethan Levitas's Untitled/This is just to say. Turning on the nature of photography itself (which always complicates the relationship between private and public property), these works intersect and resonate with current concerns about the reorganization of urban space, and its public use, in New York City. As a counterpoint, Glenn Ligon offers the literal narrative of his own housing in the city, as a reminder that behind these (now) public images lie myriad personal and private stories.


Recent Publications

Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road

By Isaac Gewirtz

Drawing on manuscript materials in the Library's Jack Kerouac Archive, Beatific Soul traces Kerouac's tumultuous and often traumatic journey from his working-class boyhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, to New York City, where he became one of the fathers of the Beat movement. The author's childhood traumas and epiphanies, family and literary influences, early writings, literary and artistic theories, and spirituality are fashioned into a compelling portrait of this purest of writers and most conflicted of men, who wanted only to "write a huge novel explaining everything to everybody."


Graphic Modernism from the Baltic to the Balkans

By S.A. Mansbach, with Wojciech Jan Siemaszkiewicz

This visually stunning volume offers an overview of the progressive eastern European graphic artists and writers who, in the first four decades of the 20th century, redefined and reshaped culture and its social meanings as they sought to comprehend and interpret the dynamics of a modern, postwar age. Illustrated in color with more than 50 examples of modernist publications, it includes works on paper by such artists as El Lissitzky, Laszla Moholy-Nagy, Karel Teige, Niklavs Strunke, Victor Brauner, and others, all drawn from the Library's extensive holdings of eastern and southeastern European materials.


Making the Scene: The Midtown Y Photography Gallery, 1972-1996

By Stephen C. Pinson

The Midtown Y Photography Gallery was the first nonprofit organization in New York City with a mission to provide a public space for the display of photographs, helping dozens of photographers make the scene that it helped to bring about over the 25 years of its existence, from 1972 to 1996. This publication, a companion to an exhibition at The New York Public Library, is drawn from the Midtown Y Photography Gallery Archive, bequeathed to the Library in 1998, and housed in the Photography Collection of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, and the Manuscripts and Archives Division. It includes an introduction by the exhibition curator, two dozen photographs reproduced in black and white and in color, a complete list of exhibitions presented at the Midtown Y Photography Gallery, and a chronology of significant happenings on the photography scene during the same time period.


Top Cats: The Life and Times of The New York Public Library Lions

By Susan G. Larkin

The magnificent marble lions flanking the entrance to The New York Public Library are familiar and beloved icons for New Yorkers and visitors to the city alike. Modeled by sculptor Edward Clark Potter and carved from pink Tennessee marble by the Piccirilli brothers in 1911, they have endured for nearly a century. With a generous selection of photographs, cartoons, prints, original drawings, and memorabilia and engaging text and sidebars, Top Cats: The Life and Times of The New York Public Library Lions surveys the history of the Lions and the extraordinary affection with which the public has responded to them.


Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan

By Roger S. Keyes

Ehon--or "picture books"--are part of an incomparable 1,350-year-old Japanese tradition. Created by artists and craftsmen, most ehon also feature essays, poems, or other texts written in beautiful, distinctive calligraphy. In this elegant, richly illustrated volume, renowned scholar Roger S. Keyes traces the history and evolution of these remarkable books through seventy key works, including many great rarities and unique masterpieces, from the Spencer Collection of The New York Public Library, whose holdings include one of the foremost collections of Japanese illustrated books in the West.


Letters to Sala: A Young Woman's Life in Nazi Labor Camps

By Ann Kirschner; with an essay by Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt

In October 1940, Sala Garncarz was sixteen, the daughter of a rabbi and teacher and the youngest of eleven children in a poor family living in Sosnowiec, Poland, close to the German border. When her older sister Raizel was ordered to report to a Nazi forced labor camp, Sala volunteered to take her place. Neither she nor her family suspected that six weeks of required labor would stretch to almost five years of slavery. Letters to Sala tells the story of one young woman's experiences in the most inhumane and unimaginable of situations. An essay by historians Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt provides background about the web of Nazi labor camps in occupied Europe, a less-documented and less-familiar aspect of the Holocaust. Illustrations are drawn primarily from the remarkable collection of more than 300 letters and other documents donated by the Kirschner family to the Library's Dorot Jewish Division in April 2005.