NYPL DISPLAYS RECENT ACQUISITIONS

Comic books from the 1960s. A recording of a musical chess match between composer John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. Rare 16th century woodcuts. An antique map of Central Park.

All are showcased in the New York Public Library’s latest exhibit, “What’s New? Recent Acquisitions.”

Those items and roughly 150 others are on view at the main branch’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue through February 11.

The goal of the exhibit is “to show that we’re collecting to serve a wide variety of needs for our visitors,” said Kailen Rogers, a curatorial associate at NYPL.

One of Rogers’s favorite pieces is a magazine from the 2000s called Rikers Review. The articles were written by inmates at the city jail and then put together by people outside jail who then distributed the magazine.

“We have thousands of publications, but this is the kind of thing that is special and important,” Rogers said. “We maybe wouldn’t have heard about it otherwise, because it’s not on every newsstand.”

Some of the items were purchased from dealers, others were donated, and a few were brought at auction. The pieces will go back to their respective collections once the exhibit ends to give researchers time and space to study them.

“Confessionario Para Los Curas de Indios” is among the oldest books printed in the Americas and found a temporary home in the exhibit. The book was printed in 1585 for missionaries as a means to convert indigenous people in what is now South America to Christianity. There are six known copies of the book. Rogers said the dealer called up the library’s rare books curator and asked him if we would be interested in it. “The curator tried to play it very cool,” Rogers said. “But inside his heart was just racing, because in his world this is a really big find.”

Membership applications from the Antigua Progressive Society are on display. The applications were for immigrants from the Caribbean who came to Harlem in the 1930s. “Now the descendants of these people use these as genealogy records,” Rogers said. Families have come in and been moved by tracing their ancestors.

The library last year purchased a comic book collection with issues dating from the 1960s to the 1990s. “It’s a mix of comics by Latino authors or that feature Latino characters,” said Jason Baumann, an assistant director for collection development at NYPL and a comic book enthusiast. Of the six comic books on exhibit, Baumann prefers one called Skull the most. “It’s an amazing comic with great art,” he said. “I think it shows the role of Latinos in the counter-culture.”

Andie Arnold and Kevan Rahav were exploring the first floor of the library when they saw the exhibit room and decided to check it out. They looked at the Jewish marriage contract and felt a connection to it. “He’s Jewish and we just got married like Saturday, so it was kind of interesting to see how they did it in the past,” Arnold said. The couple is from Utah and are in New York for their honeymoon.

Her husband liked the more visual pieces like the sketches from the Japanese artist Ariyoshi Kondo and a landscape drawing. “Something that usually attracts me when I see those kind of colors, it has a somewhat realistic, but brush look to it,” Rahav said.

The exhibit also features recorded interviews with Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr., a proof copy of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” a linocut by Kara Walker and the set model for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Off-Broadway production of “In the Heights.”

Cynthia Chaldekas, a librarian, was only able to take a peek at the exhibit, because visitors were filling the room but she enjoyed the Warsaw wood cuts and one of the journalist Joseph Mitchell’s hats. “I think they should always be doing this, but they probably don’t do it enough for my liking,” Chaldekas said. “There should be something where they’re always focusing on their collections and the precious things that they have, which they have a ton.”