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Worth Beyond Words: Romana Javitz
and The New York Public Library's Picture Collection
By Anthony T. Troncale, Associate Head, Digital Unit,
Preservation Division, The New York Public Library
The following article was originally published in the Library's journal,
Biblion. An
exhibition about Javitz, Subject Matters: Photography, Romana Javitz,
and The New York Public Library", was on view through March
of 1998 in the Center for the Humanities.
Within two years of the opening of The New York Public Library's central
building in 1911, the Print Room found itself overwhelmed with requests for
prints strictly from a subject point of view. Most of these requests came
from artists and illustrators in the employ of New York City's burgeoning
graphic arts industries and cultural enterprises, which included movie studios,
Broadway and vaudeville theatres, advertising agencies, publishing companies,
and fashion houses, all competing for new ideas and pressuring their artists
and illustrators to deliver them. The Print Room, a repository for fine art
prints, did have a wealth of the sort of material that was sought, but its
holdings constituted a rare and fragile collection that could not withstand
heavy use. Moreover, these holdings were cataloged by artist only, not by
subject. Print Room staff therefore directed artists and illustrators to the
Art Division to consult the clipping files there, or to the Children's Room
in the Circulation Division, where illustrations could be found in children's
books and encyclopedias.
The situation at the Library, and the increasing use of pictures as a means
of communication and enrichment in modern culture, resulted from the explosive
growth of the printing arts at the turn of the century. The industrial impetus
created by the sudden and simultaneous late nineteenth-century advancements
in photography and photolithography set the stage for the coming modern age
in the visual and graphic arts. Improvements in printing presses allowed for
more color illustrations, and halftone screens brought better photographic
reproduction. Innovations in camera and film design, particularly George Eastman's
Kodak camera and the dry plate negative, contributed to the growth of a large
amateur photography movement. Soon, the American public was bombarded with
graphically oriented media. This created a huge demand for illustrations and
eye-catching layouts in advertising, magazines, newspapers, and movie and
theatre posters, as well as for textile, architectural, and industrial designs.
In these circumstances, the Library's solution of sending people to the Children's
Room, where the content was inadequate, or to the Art Division, where the
materials could not leave the room, was not enough. In 1914, the Circulation
Department began saving plates, posters, postcards, and photographs for the
new sort of "reader." The Library's annual report for 1915 announced: ".
. . a picture collection for lending was desirable. Requests have come from
schools, city history clubs, moving picture actors, and advertisers. . . .
Borrowers include not only people who have been card holders in the Branches,
but an increasing number whose first interest in the Library was aroused by
the picture collection."(1)
By the end of that year, 17,991 pictures had been prepared for circulation.
Many of these pictures came from old magazines and books that might otherwise
have been sold for scrap paper. Donations began to pour in. As word spread
about the availability of the pictures, the Library assigned Ellen Perkins,
a chief cataloger in the Circulation Department, to oversee the program's
development. In 1926, with the growing collection now housed in Room 67 of
the central building, Ms. Perkins was given the position of Head of the Picture
Collection, and the Picture Collection was formally established.
In this modest way began a collection that is today, at five million items,
a major resource for visual ideas. Over the years, the Picture Collection
staff built and organized so diverse and comprehensive a collection that libraries,
corporations, and governments from around the world have studied its structure
and consulted its librarians in order to apply its lessons to their own picture
libraries. Historically, the development of the collection illustrates the
way in which effective approaches to service and cataloging for visual materials
evolved, and how the cataloging of pictures came to diverge from the traditional
bibliographical orientation of descriptive cataloging, emphasizing instead
the maximum number of access points to a picture's subject content.
In most early attempts at subject cataloging of visual materials, catalogers
simply approached pictures as if they were books. As a result, they failed
to tap the multiple uses and meanings of pictorial materials and to organize
them into accessible subject headings.(2) Changes in language and terminology, along with obscure subject
arrangements, often diluted the potential of the images for use. Where a college
library might maintain collections of Lewis Hine's and Jacob Riis's photographs
in their social work departments, with illustrative slides made available
for art and architecture students and faculty, public library picture collections,
notably New York City's, had to serve a more eclectic constituency. Representatives
of commercial, industrial, and artistic interests all had specific needs,
and each had its own way of describing the materials it needed.
Some of the problems in early attempts at subject arrangement were encountered
by Ellen Perkins when, soon after her appointment, she visited the Newark
Public Library to see a picture collection started by John Cotton Dana, a
pioneer in many fields of librarianship, as well as the founder of the Newark
Museum. Having created the first known picture collection in 1889 at the Denver
Public Library, Dana further developed the idea at Newark, where he was appointed
chief librarian in 1902. Dana's awareness of businessmen's and educators'
needs for access to library materials served as a model for Perkins in formulating
her own scheme for the much larger arena of New York City.(3) But Dana's subject headings for pictures were problematic.
In his idiosyncratic filing system, for example, one would have to look under
"F" for "Forms of Land and Water" to find "Niagara Falls," a situation reflecting
nineteenth-century bibliographical practice and hierarchical mind-set. A reassessment
of subject headings would be needed to reflect the fast-changing styles and
fashions of the machine age and their new nomenclatures.
If The New York Public Library was to adapt to the era of mechanical reproduction
of visual images, it would need someone more attuned to contemporary culture
than Perkins. That person was Romana Javitz (1903-1980). While studying painting
at the Art Student's League, Javitz began working part-time, first in the
Children's Room in 1919, and later at the Picture Collection in 1924. Perhaps
drawn to the collection instinctively because of her artistic nature, Javitz
found the Picture Collection a perfect fit for her interests and talents:
the role of purveyor of visual ideas suited her well. With the retirement
of Perkins in 1929, Javitz was appointed head of the Picture Collection. (4)
Born in Russia to Polish parents, Javitz immigrated to America with her family.
Since her mother was a hat milliner and her father an importer of fine and
rare woods, Romana and her brother, Alex, enjoyed a comfortable upbringing
and a middle-class education in the Bronx and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Javitz's immigrant background made her sympathetic to the thousands of people
who sought self-education at the Library. Her interest and training in the
arts served her well in understanding the possibilities that pictorial material
offered to the artist, the designer, and the student alike.
Before she assumed the role of head of the Picture Collection, Javitz traveled
to Europe to study art and the use of picture collections by state organizations.
In 1925 and 1926 I visited libraries and museums in Italy, Austria, Poland,
Germany, France and England. At that time I studied the organization and content
of documentary pictorial collections. I was especially interested in how these
foreign governments perpetuated in pictures changing customs and costumes
of their own peoples. Everywhere I went I found that the record of folk arts
[was] exceedingly rich and well preserved and that the governments had been
interested in subsidizing this recording and documentation. . . . It seemed
shameful to me then that we had not developed pride enough in our own past
to record the appearance of what the people wore, the details of their kitchens,
their tools, their houses. (5)
Upon her return to America, Javitz began to remedy the lack of attention
Americans then gave to their own folk arts and crafts, especially those of
African Americans. One of her first initiatives upon taking up her Picture
Collection duties was to offer assistance to Arthur Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938),
who was Curator of the Library's Division of Negro History, Literature and
Prints from 1932 to 1938. Javitz provided him with important prints, photographs,
and plates on African American subjects culled from the Picture Collection,
and in 1937, at her request, Roy Stryker, of the government's Resettlement
Administration, donated duplicate photographs depicting African Americans.
(6)
Another project that Javitz helped initiate resulted in one of the most comprehensive
records of folk arts and design in America. In 1935, Javitz, along with artist-users
of the collection, formulated the idea for an Index of American Design and
had it accepted as a Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. The
plan was to hire unemployed commercial artists and illustrators to record
systematically, in watercolors, the decorative arts of America's rural and
urban regions. Holger Cahill (1887-1960), a successor to Dana at the Newark
Public Library and national director of the Federal Arts Project from 1935
to 1943, described the founding of the Index in a catalogue produced by the
National Gallery of Art:
The Index idea as it was later developed by the WPA Federal Art Project
resulted from discussions between Romana Javitz, head of The New York Public
Library's Picture Collection, and artists who came to the Library for research.
This was in the early spring of 1935. Miss Javitz and the Picture Collection
staff had recognized for some time the need for a comprehensive source record
of American design. Prominent among the artists who participated in the discussions
at the Library was Ruth Reeves, a textile designer and painter. She brought
the idea to Mrs. Frances Pollack, head of Educational Projects for the New
York City Emergency Relief Administration, and suggested that artists employed
on Government projects carry it out. Later, Miss Reeves, who was the missionary
of the Index idea, brought it to the attention of WPA officials in Washington
and to Edward Bruce, head of the Section on Painting and Sculpture. Mrs. Pollack
immediately saw the Index as a solution for the problem of commercial artist
unemployment and asked Miss Javitz to formulate a plan. (7)
The artists would record everything from iron railings to furniture, toys
to tools, kitchens to carpentry. Administered by Javitz, Reeves, and Pollack
in New York City, the Index soon sprouted offices in a number of states across
the country, employing hundreds of artists and illustrators. The thousands
of watercolors that were produced now form an important record of American
crafts and design. The entire collection was later transferred to the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it still helps scholars to define
the American aesthetic.
Javitz was much concerned with access to the collections, and she introduced
important innovations. In the early 1930s, she found the Picture Collection
besieged by foreign visitors and immigrant artists who asked again and again
for pictures illustrating American terms and words or objects of American
material culture. In 1931, she overcame the language barrier by instituting
a policy requiring the public to record their requests for pictures by describing,
or drawing, them on a call slip.(8) This resulted in better communication
between users and staff and helped develop a current language for use in cross-indexing
and new headings. It also helped identify and maintain a record of subjects
that were in demand.
In 1934, Javitz addressed the need to devise a better system of subject access
for the ever-growing collection, which then numbered 667,967 items, a 42 percent
increase over the preceding year. Any new system would need to reflect new
commercial and industrial vocabularies and interests and the current nomenclature
of artists. To update, cross-index, and source the entire subject headings
file, including large movie stills and postcard collections, were big tasks.
To accomplish them required the resources of several artist-trained workers
to help weed, sort, and describe thousands of pictures. Javitz found such
artists through the Works Progress Administration, which initially provided
thirty-one workers (later increased to forty). This team systematically eliminated
outdated materials from the collections (nineteenth-century prints, for example),
added newer, fresher, more modern materials, and streamlined the process of
getting the materials to the public and then back on the shelves. Numbers
written or stamped on each picture led the user to a catalog card index of
original sources.(9)
Keeping current a system of subject headings based upon the changing vocabulary
of the New York City public was nothing less than daunting. But Javitz and
her staff went even beyond this, and adopted a flexible and eclectic assortment
of schemes based on Regions, Styles, Types, and Year. Subheading
arrangements depended on the subjects' geographical, stylistic, or chronological
identities.
Interviewed at her home around 1970, Javitz used the subjects of labor and
costume to illustrate the scheme.
It seems to me that the subject heading establishment can follow a need.
The scheme of subdivision is the key to the arrangement of the material within
the subject heading divisions. For example, if your heading is Laborers, then
you are going to subdivide them chronologically. But if it's before 1900,
it is filed chronologically, and then by country, if it's after 1900, it's
filed regionally. Now you may wonder why. There is a quantitative problem
there (and differentiations between countries pictorially) because of the
introduction of picture magazines and the history of photo printing. The quantity
for the twentieth century is great. It's also more regional because of publications
being all over the world. So if you are looking for a picture of labor in
the 1600's, let's say capital and labor, the material is so sparse and will
always remain sparse. Now, in certain aspects, this works backwards. For example,
Costume, which we use for Fashion, is arranged chronologically for the twentieth
century, because fashion is an artificial dress dictated each year. Beginning
in the 1900's, it's arranged by date without a breakdown of country. Before
1900 it's arranged by a breakdown of country and then by date. (10)
This latter scheme was adopted because peasant costumes of the nineteenth
century generally reflected regional tastes, while the fashion-oriented twentieth
century often reflected styles that transcended borders and regions and changed
yearly.
But whatever its organization, the collection could be only as good as the
quality of the pictures themselves. In the 1930s and 40s, several major acquisitions
helped to build the Picture Collection into a world-class resource. Movie
studios used the Picture Collection often and recognized its importance by
establishing depository arrangements with the Library. Several newspapers
and magazines, including The New York Times and Newsweek, donated current
news photographs from their files. Ten thousand photographs of paintings were
purchased in 1936 from the Frick Collection for the files. Exhibitions were
staged to highlight aspects of the collection; typical was an exhibit entitled
Romance of the Railroad for which several railroad companies donated
photographs illustrating all aspects of the railroad industry.(11) Eager to represent current lifestyles and trends, the Picture
Collection, through the cooperation of local businesses, obtained photographs
of outstanding window displays, architecture, vehicles, fashions, vaudeville
acts, and the dance. In 1934, the Public Works Art Project donated ninety-one
fine prints and twenty paintings that would form the beginning of a circulating
collection of framed pictures for use in the branch libraries. (12)
In addition, Javitz began to purchase books, pamphlets, and periodicals specifically
for the purpose of cutting out the plates and illustrations, to selectively
enhance the collection in subject areas that had been inadequately documented.
While this deconstruction of material often horrified other librarians, Javitz
reveled in the practice. To her thinking, dismembering a book not only allowed
for redistribution of its pieces toward other, perhaps better, purposes, but
also demystified the book as an object.
Among the thousands of items donated to the Picture Collection in 1936 and
1937 were photographs from the U.S. government's Resettlement Administration.
This was a New Deal program to assist farmers and their tenants who had been
displaced by drought and economic ruin. The Photographic Section of the RA,
later renamed the Farm Security Administration, was created to document the
plight of those in need. Roy E. Stryker, the head of the Photographic Section,
hired several talented photographers to cover the rural and urban communities
affected by the Depression. At the suggestion of the painter Ben Shahn (1898-1969),
one of the photographers he hired, Stryker began regularly to send duplicate
photographs from the Resettlement Administration to the Picture Collection.
(13) Also in 1937, Stryker
donated a prepared exhibition for the Picture Collection entitled Soil and
Land, in which RA photographs graphically presented the struggle against drought
and erosion. (14)
Continue to Page 2
Notes
1. NYPL Report (1915): 36.
2. The Research Libraries often arranged loose prints and photographs
into subject groups and pasted them onto pages for
binding. See "French Chateaux photographs" [MQWF++]. A single subject
heading is attached: Castles-France.
3. Chalmers Hadley, John Cotton Dana, A Sketch (Chicago: American Library
Association, 1943), 52, 63.
4. Robert Sink, NYPL Archives, to author, Sept. 20, 1994.
5. Javitz to Holger Cahill, April 29, 1949, 1, in Romana Javitz Papers, NYPL Archives.
6. Javitz to Arthur Schomburg, May 25, 1937, in Arthur A. Schomburg
Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
"We sent you by library messenger a package of photographs from
the Resettlement Administration. These are not all you selected
from their files because many of them were poor prints and . . .
were destroyed in Washington, which is either a sad commentary on
their censorship or, perhaps just high standards, I don't know."
7. Holger Cahill, Introduction in Clarence P. Hornung,
Treasury of American Design (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
1972), xxii.
8. Picture Collection Annual Report for 1931, in Romana
Javitz Papers.
9. Picture Collection Annual Report for 1934, 1, in Romana
Javitz Papers.
10. Javitz, interviewed by Robert Yampolsky after her
retirement in 1968, transcript, in Romana Javitz Papers.
11. Picture Collection Annual Report for 1934, 1, in Romana
Javitz Papers.
12. Picture Collection Annual Reports for 1934 and 1936, in
Romana Javitz Papers.
13. Stryker to Javitz, Feb. 17, 1936, in Romana Javitz
Papers.
14. Picture Collection Annual Report for 1937, 1, in Romana
Javitz Papers.
Originally published in Biblion: The Bulletin of The
New York Public Library
Volume 4, Number 1, Fall 1995. ©1995 Anthony T. Troncale.
