Celebrating 100 Years at the New York Public Library

Oh, what those lions guard.

From an article in the New York Times as the library celebrates 100 years...

There are cuneiform tablets and typewriters, a Gutenberg Bible and 1960s political broadsheets; Kepler’s diagram of the structure of the universe and women’s dance cards from 19th-century balls; T. S. Eliot’s typescript of “The Wasteland” with emendations by Ezra Pound, and a Russian translation of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” Also on view are the walking stick of Virginia Woolf’s that her husband found floating in a river four days after she drowned herself and Beethoven’s sketches as he worked on the Scherzo of the “Archduke” Trio.

But what ties the library’s research collections together? And what themes does the exhibition itself reveal? That is less clear.

Some artifacts are of profound historical importance, like Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten manuscript of “The Declaration of Independence.” Others are of interest because of associations with recent political history, like a collection of condoms distributed by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in the 1990s.

Some are illuminating, like Charles Dickens’s marked-up copy of “David Copperfield,” in which he excised paragraphs and inscribed prompts that he used in public readings from the book. And his letter opener fully merits the adjective “Dickensian,” with its quirky peculiarity and demonstrative eccentricity: the handle is made from the paw of Dickens’s pet cat Bob, and the blade is engraved “C. D. In Memory of Bob 1862,” the year of the cat’s death.