NYPL Blogs

I hear the phrase uttered often, "There are no good Rock & Roll Bands any more" and there has been recent talk about the death of mainstream rock and roll. Over the next few weeks I will highlight 4 modern day groups that deserve attention from young and old fans of mainstream Rock and Roll.

In this week's installment of I Love Reading I want to talk about the kind of reading that is not books, not news, not blogs, but something in between. It demands a little bit more of your attention span than Twitter, but maybe not as much as your book group's latest pick. It can be from last week or fifteen years ago, and still be relevant to today. It can be a true tale of crime and punishment, an industry exposé, an interview or profile of a famous figure, an in-depth review, or a speech. It could be a short story, nonfiction, or an interpretation or some kind. In my opinion, it makes the best kind of reading for airplanes, waiting rooms, the subway, and my couch. 

For the week of February 19th, 2012 we have hardcover fiction, hardcover non-fiction, and hardcover advice & misc.

If you have an iPhone, iPad or Android phone, there is a free app! Use it with your Library card/username and pin.

Click on any of the titles below and place a hold to request the item. Remember to update your contact information (phone number or e-mail address), so you are notified when the book arrives for you at your local library. Don't have a library card yet? It's simple! Find out how to get one. Titles are available in regular print, large print, audio, and in electronic format — for FREE!

Looking back, the DVDs that came to the library in February were kind of crummy, but man, in the month of March, the DVD movies coming to the Library are great. Reserve titles now using the Library's new BiblioCommons catalog.

This week I'd like to focus on the period details of The Servants. Mark has already journeyed into a bygone era of domestic workers who lived and worked in the basement of the homes of the wealthy. The smooth running of the house (and the lives of its owners) depended on their working in tandem. The life of the servants below stairs was strictly structured and hierarchical — the butler, the housekeeper, the cook, the kitchen maids all observed the traditions and the rules.

The reference librarians of ASK NYPL recently received a very interesting question about Virginia Woolf.

“Virginia Woolf typed all her major works and other writings on a typewriter. But what brand of typewriter did she use?”

The house is for sale again, apparently — One of the most famous in Greenwich Village, 75 1/2 Bedford Street, otherwise known as the skinniest house in New York.

Formerly, it was the home of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her birthday is February 22.

We were fortunate enough to have Mark Siegel at the Bronx Library Center on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at a TeenLIVE at the NYPL event. Siegel works for First Second. He wrote Moving House, Seadogs: An Epic Ocean Operetta, and illustrated To Dance: A Ballerina's Graphic Novel.

An orange Crock Pot™ was a familiar presence in my kitchen in the 70s and 80s, a parental wedding present displaced by the microwave as the decade progressed. I had no idea the slow cooker was back until my youngest sister handed me a lightweight modern version on my last visit home. "You'll use it all the time, trust me," she said, already on her way out the door to her next engagement.

Looking for work?

Would you like to work for a company that offers job opportunities and extensive training programs, such as eLearning, online training, functional training, and leadership development? How about working for a company that offers education reimbursement for your MBA, CPA, MS in computer engineering or unpaid sabbaticals to pursue personal interests?

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division Oral History Archive is home to unique and rare dance-related audio recordings that capture the voices of dancers, choreographers, composers, lighting designers, costume designers, and dance scholars from the mid-20th Century through today. These recordings encompass a wide range of original and donated content, including Dance Division-produced oral history interviews, radio show broadcasts, speeches, lecture/demonstrations, panel discussions, dance classes/workshops, and personal recordings.

The curve of a guitar; a kerchiefed woman holding a white chicken; the steeply sloped rooftops of an unknown city; a bird of prey with a long sharp beak.

As previously posted, on March 15, SIBL will celebrate Freedom of Information Day (FOI Day) with speaker Robert Weissman from the organization Public Citizen. FOI Day has been the main focus of our annual efforts to highlight the public's right to know. But it need not be NYPL's only activity, and so I offer a suggestion: let's use this as an opportunity to move from one day to an entire week — Sunshine Week at NYPL!

If you’re writing a business plan or have recently started a new business, you need to keep up with industry news and trends. One way to do this is with trade journals.

In this week's episode of I Love Reading, I will talk about updates. I don't mean the kind of updates that clutter your Facebook feed, though they are basically the same thing. When I say updates I mean news in the journalistic, newspaper sense, news from your field or area of interest, or news that is created and shared among your group of friends and trusted online acquaintances.

The headlines about her death called her the first African American ballerina of the Metropolitan Opera, but Janet Collins was much more than that. A new biography, Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins, highlights the career of this pioneering artist, drawing partly on materials donated by Collins and others in the Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Author Yaël Tamar Lewin will be speaking about her book on Thursday, February 16 at 6 p.m. in the Bruno Walter Auditorium, and we have put together a small exhibit of materials on Collins on the third floor of the Library for the Performing Arts in celebration of her life and work. The exhibit will only run 

Dog stories was the January theme for Mixed Bag: Story Time for Grown-Ups, the read-aloud program I do on Wednesdays at lunch-time every other week. (I promised to read cat stories later this year in rebuttal.) Most of the stories I chose to read in January were selected from the book The Best Dog Stories. Since I included a list of 25 favorite films about dogs in my last blog post, this post features a list of favorite books about dogs.

I hear the phrase uttered often, "There are no good Rock & Roll Bands any more" and there has been recent talk about the death of mainstream rock and roll. Over the next few weeks I will highlight 4 modern day groups that deserve attention from young and old fans of mainstream Rock and Roll.

When Edward Estlin Cummings met Marion Morehouse in 1932, he was in the middle of a painful split from his second wife, Anne Barton. But loss soon gave way to what Cummings later described as "an ecstatic arrival." This was Marion.