NYPL Blogs: NYPL Labs

All Hands on Deck: NYPL Turns to the Crowd to Develop Digital Collections

Vicky Gan, Intern, Strategic Planning Office — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:51:48 -0400

Users are generating that reality every day at The New York Public Library through two landmark crowdsourcing endeavors, What’s on the Menu? and Map Rectifier. The former enlists the public in the transcription of historical menus, and the latter allows users to “rectify” historical maps by overlaying them on modern ones. Both projects stand out amid a glut of competitors as refreshingly guilt-free and subliminally educational uses of online time. With every menu transcribed and map rectified, users are supporting research in the humanities.

In the time it takes to deploy an angry bird, a user can identify and transcribe a dish dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. The recipe for the menu project is simple — click, type, submit, repeat — and has proven a runaway success, yielding almost half a million plates of Blue Points, porterhouses, croquettes, et al. The average visit to What’s on the Menu? is slightly under eight minutes and thirty page clicks long — an eternity on the web — and patrons are hungry for more. The initial release of 8,700 digitized menus was provisionally transcribed in just four months. NYPL recently ramped up digitization efforts to meet demand.

“There’s some kind of thrill about it,” observes Rebecca Federman, project curator and culinary collections librarian at NYPL. “Menus have an everyday nature but are also extraordinary.” They are extraordinarily rare; most restaurants scrap them after each service. Menus are a form of ephemera — printed materials, such as flyers, posters, and programs, that were not meant to be kept. They reveal the past through its quotidian details and prove, dish by dish, that we are what we eat.

For the transcriber, the collection is a treasure trove of little discoveries — the antiquated use of “farinaceous” instead of today’s “pasta”; the remarkable preponderance of oyster dishes; the revelation that steaks cost twenty-five cents, not twenty-five dollars. For the scholar, it is an invaluable source of historical data. Author William Grimes used the collection to produce a culinary history of New York. Texas A&M marine biologist Glenn Jones scoured seafood menus to study fish populations. What’s on the Menu? has also inspired users outside the academic sphere. Chefs Mario Batali and Rich Torrisi are fans of the project, and a fourth-grade class in Texas has been transcribing menus as a typing exercise. By codifying and enhancing digital collections, crowdsourcing spawns new applications for historical information.

NYPL’s Geospatial librarian, Matt Knutzen, is excited about crowdsourcing’s potential for the map collection. “You can study anything through geography, through a spatial lens,” he says. Using NYPL’s Map Rectifier, amateur cartographers align old maps with current ones to “create a historical framework for geographical information.” The maps convey much more than the locations of roads and landmarks; each layer incorporates multidisciplinary data to illuminate a specific period in a region’s development. Demographic data could chart patterns of migration. Nautical data could track changes in a harbor’s bathometry. Maps of defunct factories could have real-world implications for environmental remediation. “We’re not positioning ourselves to answer those questions,” says Knutzen. “We’re enabling people to find those answers.”

The Map Rectifier has already made a concrete impact in Haiti. In 2010, the Library contributed historical maps and georectification software to the Haiti OpenStreetMap used by earthquake aid workers. Citizen cartographers the world over collaborated to create an open-source map with up-to-date information on Haiti’s resources and infrastructure. NYPL added layers of data that helped rescue teams locate victims and coordinate relief efforts. In its way, crowdsourcing helped save lives.

Ben Vershbow sees many more such surprises down the road. Vershbow is the director of NYPL Labs, the Library’s experimental digital humanities unit. According to Vershbow, cultural heritage institutions are at last starting to step more boldly into the collaborative web. “After testing the waters on third-party services like Flickr Commons,” he says, “we are beginning to see libraries, museums, and other organizations investing in their own tools and communities, and going deeper with particular collections.” While enthusiastic about drawing users more directly into library initiatives, he is quick to note that crowdsourcing is not a goal in itself but a “solution to particular sorts of problems,” and can often open up a host of new challenges. “In asking for the public’s help in extracting the menus data,” he says, “we are making an implicit promise to do something interesting and useful with it. That means more investment in technology and in library staff dedicated to overseeing, growing, and explaining the menu database. What it means fundamentally,” Vershbow continues, “is re-imagining the very roles of librarians and curators, positioning them not only as custodians of physical collections, but as leaders of online communities.”

NYPL Labs staff are already on the hunt for their next “blockbuster” project. They’re considering collections to be tagged, transcribed, and curated by the public. They’re floating ideas for “maker sites,” which would allow users to create new media using items from NYPL’s Digital Gallery. They envision, in the distant future, a fully searchable, cross-referenced map of historical information — an online time machine. Click on a restaurant to pull up its 1902 menu. Pinpoint a teacher who lived on Mott Street. See the shows from the Lyceum Theatre’s opening night.

“It’s uncharted territory,” says Vershbow. And that’s what’s so thrilling about it.

Musical of the Month: "Humpty Dumpty" (1868)

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 07:54:33 -0400

Within the world of music theater there are many sub-genres — pop opera, juke-box musical, concept musical, and so on — that go in and out of style as generations transition and audience tastes change. At present, the juke-box musical and musical comedies are very popular; 18 years ago — when I first fell in love with musicals — pop operas like Evita, Les Miserables, and Phantom of the Opera filled out the season schedule at most regional touring houses. The Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-style “integrated book musical” seemed shockingly innovative in the 1940s, became a joke in the 1970s, and today The Book of Mormon, using more-or-less the same form, has sold out until sometime next year (of course, I can’t be absolutely sure of this until I see it myself, so if anyone has tickets... ).

Some sub-genres, though, have gone so far out of style that they have been almost entirely forgotten. In the United States, pantomime is one of those forms. Although in England, especially around Christmastime, pantomimes are still very popular, most Americans (myself included until several years ago) think only of the the work of street performers in white makeup leaning on imaginary countertops when they hear the word. In fact, pantomime is a complex and stylized form of musical story-telling that, in the late 19th century, helped to pave the way for the musical theater we know today. August's Musical of the Month, Humpty Dumpty, represents one of the most popular American pantomimes of the 19th century.

Although pantomime has its roots in a form of popular theater in ancient Greece, the style found in Humpty Dumpty emerged in France when a legally-enforced monopoly allowed the Comedie-Francaise the sole right to perform plays with spoken dialogue. Other theater companies attempted to get around the ban by singing their lines or else using gesture to communicate silently. As the Charlie Chaplin's silent films demonstrate, slap-stick is a form of humor that works particular well when accompanied only by music, and so physical comedy flourished in this legally enforced silence and became a defining characteristic of pantomime. By the 19th century in England and America, spoken dialogue was no longer legally banned, but the form itself preferred broad gesture to words. George L. Fox popularized the form in New York in the years after the Civil War, but it faded away in the States around the beginning of the 20th century.

Pantomimes would often begin, as in Humpty Dumpty, with a short scene of spoken, rhyming couplets, but this would be followed with silent slap-stick, songs, dance, and spectacular stage effects. The audience could count on a plot taken from a traditional fairy tale or nursery rhyme and a cast of characters that almost always included a matronly “Dame” played by a man in woman’s clothing, two young lovers, and a clown whose physical comedy drove the action.

All of this does not translate terribly well to text, which is perhaps why I have been unable to locate a complete 19th century script for Humpty Dumpty. The text linked below is a 1910 reconstruction by an actor, John Denier, who once performed with George Fox. When compared with an original program (also linked below), the Denier text seems somewhat abbreviated. The Humpty Dumpty performed at the Olympic Theater in 1868 had 16 scenes including songs, ballets, and “Grand Transformations.” Denier’s reconstruction, part of a series of “Acting Dramas,” was probably intended for amateur, regional theaters with relatively small budgets. Further, these smaller companies would probably have felt some freedom and even obligation to interpolate their own scenes to showcase the skills of particular cast members. By 1910, though, pantomime in the U.S. would probably have seemed a relatively archaic form, and it’s not clear Denier’s reconstruction was ever terribly successful.

Today, pantomime in the U.S. is probably most visible in the sketch comedy of Saturday Night Live, in some children’s cartoons (especially those that follow the model of Tom & Jerry), and in amusement park shows at Disney World, Six Flags, and Branson, Missouri. Its contribution to the forms of American popular musical theater today is, perhaps, minimal, though it does represent a sub-category that, if now obsolete in the United States, remains hugely popular in much of the rest of the English-speaking world.

If you're interested in learning more about pantomime, I've found Millie Taylor's British Pantomime Performance a good place to start.

Download the script

File type What it's for HTML Web browsers ePub eBook readers except Kindle PDF Kindle and Adobe Acrobat Plain text Just about anything TEI Digital Humanities geeks

View the program

Online PDF

Musical of the Month: Florodora

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 13:38:56 -0400

For July’s Musical of the Month, we take a summer vacation to a tropical island in the Philippines: a place where the scent of a native flower perfumes the air and provides both the place, and the musical, with its name: Florodora. It is the South Pacific in 1900, before the ravages of the Second World War and the social conscience of Rodgers and Hammerstein caused audiences to consider it as anything other than an Edenic garden of delights. Every young man and woman in the piece is beautiful, and the most pressing concerns are not racism and war, but petty swindlers and a tyrannical but ineffectual aristocratic landlord.

The plot of Florodora is convoluted and, at times, incoherent. A wealthy British aristocrat, Cyrus W. Gilfain, stole the secret recipe for the perfume Florodora from the family of one of his farm girls, Dolores. He plans to marry her to remove any doubt about his ownership of the business, but Dolores has fallen in love with Frank Abercoed, Gilfain’s head clerk, who is actually a British aristocrat who fled to the island to avoid an undesirable arranged marriage. Into all of this arrives a comic mystic named Tweedlepunch, a kind of prototype of Oklahoma’s Ali Hakim, who uses the pseudoscience of phrenology to arrange marriages for all the men and women on the island based on the bumps on their heads. Gilfain bribes him to decree that Dolores should marry him, and his daughter, Angela, should marry Abercoed (thereby legitimatizing both his business and aristocratic credentials). Of course, Gilfain is the only one on the island happy with this arrangement, so nearly everyone (including, eventually Gilfain) flees Florodora for England, where all is finally resolved by some additional trickery by Tweedlepunch.

The frothy inconsequence of this musical can be a bit difficult for modern audiences to appreciate. Much like The Black Crook, its primary attraction was not the plot but the chorus of beautiful women it presented on stage. The Florodora Sextet (sometimes called the "Florodora Girls") and their song (titled in the libretto “Tell Me Pretty Maiden”) became iconic and were frequently referenced and parodied in the first half of the twentieth century.

Unlike female chorus of The Black Crook, however, the "Florodora Girls" were not known for their sexually provocative costumes. Although the women in the first act seem to have worn somewhat revealing tropical clothing, photographs of the original production suggest that the famous Sextet was dressed, not in revealing tights, but in elegant gowns. The women were, nonetheless, sex symbols for their day. Many were courted by wealthy men, sometimes with unhappy results. Musical theater fans may be aware of the story of a replacement cast member, Evelyn Nesbit, who achieved notoriety when her abusive and jealous husband Harry Thaw shot her former boyfriend, Stanford White. The case is featured in the 1998 musical Ragtime and in its source material, E. L. Doctorow’s book of the same name.

All this, of course, only increased public interest in the musical and its cast. The original production ran for over a year in New York, toured extensively, and was revived in 1905 and again in 1920. Despite its early popularity, though, copies of the script have been very difficult to find. Today, you can read the script and the score yourself on the device of your choice by downloading one of the files below:

Libretto

File Type What it's for EPUB (Most ebook readers, except Kindle) PDF (Computer and Kindle) HTML (Web browser) Plain text (Almost any digital device) TEI (Digital Humanities geeks)

Program from 1900 Casino Theater Production (NYPL)

View Download PDF

Score

Harvard / Google Books Harvard / Internet Archive copy 1 Harvard / Internet Archive copy 2 University of Illinois / Internet Archive copy 3

A note on the text of the libretto: This copy of the script is transcribed from a typescript dated labeled “Casino Theater, November 1900” in NYPL’s collection. This copy does not include lyrics to all of the songs and contains many typographical errors. For this edition, I have not included the missing lyrics, but have corrected many of the obvious typos. To check my work, I used the University of Virginia’s automatic collation program, Juxta, to compare my choices to those made by a Florodora fan named Karl Baecker in a transcript cached from Baecker's now defunct Geocities site. In some cases, where I am not sure what was meant, I have let the original error stand. For instance, upon Gilfain’s entrance he is described as wearing a “spaca” coat. Baecker corrects this to “an opera coat,” which strikes me as an odd thing to wear on a tropical island. Orchestrator Larry Moore and advisor to this project did some research and discovered Alpaca coats were common traveling clothes for British aristocrats at the time, but Broadway discographer Darrell C. Karl also pointed out that abaca is a light fabric made in the Philippines and commonly used to make clothing. I prefer "Alpaca," but, because I am unsure, I have let the original stand and left the decision to the reader.

Maury and the Menu: A Brief History of the Cunard Steamship Company

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:05:38 -0400

In 1907 the Cunard Steamship Company launched the first of their Express Liners, the Lusitania and the Mauretania, ships that become bywords for speed, luxury and elegance in transatlantic travel. They were the first of the "Grand Hotels" at sea, sister ships each as long as the Capitol Building (and, interestingly, the Houses of Parliament), that came equipped with palm courts, orchestras, a la carte restaurants, electric lifts, telephones, and daily newspapers printed at sea. They were the first big British liners to be powered by four revolutionary Parsons steam turbine engines, and each had a top speed of over 25 knots. Unsurprisingly, both went on to hold the Blue Riband for fastest Atlantic crossing, and the Mauritania held the record for fastest eastbound crossing for nearly 20 years, between 1909 and 1929. Though always reknowned for their safety, Cunard ships did not always have a reputation for carrying passengers in speed and comfort...

The New York Public Library's What's on the Menu? transcription project includes a selection of menus from Cunard ships, including the Etruria (launched 1884), Campania (1893), Lucania (1893) and Mauretania (1907). Taken from the Library's extensive Menu Collection, one menu, dated Tuesday, November 26th, 1907, is for a luncheon served in the First Class Dining Saloon of the Mauretania. According to The New York Times the diners were not passengers, but 300 guests of the Cunard Line invited to inspect the "new quadruple turbine liner [...] at her pier." Built in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear in the North-East of England, by the Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson Company, work on the Mauretania began in 1903. The ship was launched by the Dowager Duchess of Roxburghe, September 20th, 1906, and fitting out completed by 1907. Maury, as the ship came to be known, weighed 32,000 tons, was 790 feet long by 88 feet wide, with room for 2,165 passengers and 800 crew. When launched she was "the largest moving structure ever built". During speed trials security surrounding news of the Mauretania's performance was so tight that carrier pigeons were used to maintain confidentiality.

Twenty eight different woods were used to decorate the ship, and furnishings and tapestries were hand made to the height of Edwardian taste. Harold A. Peto, an architect famous for country house interior design work in Britain was hired to oversee decoration. Scientific American described the Dining Saloon as arranged on two levels and decorated in a style known as Francois Premier, with richly carved woodwork and panelling, a "loftily groined dome [...] the crown of which terminates in a gilded convex disk, round which runs a balustrade sheltering hidden electric lights." Beneath the enormous glass dome, chairs and tables were arranged to give diners a good view of their fellow passengers. After their meal, diners could smoke a cigar in the plush, Walnut pannelled First-Class Smoking Room, or relax in the First-Class Lounge. They could order coffee in the very first covered Verandah Cafe, or take a stroll around the the ship's observation deck, situated under the Pilot House and the first to offer protection from the elements.

The Mauretania made her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York, November 16th, 1907, and was waved off by a crowd of over 50,000 well wishers. The ship was widely anticipated to break the westbound tranatlantic crossing record set by the Lusitania two weeks before and capture what would informally become known as the Blue Riband. Unfortunately rough weather meant that this did not happen - although the title would be captured two years later - but despite this there was still great interest surrounding the ship's arrival in New York. British and American newspapers covered not only the story of the Mauretania's maiden voyage, but also her commissioning, construction, launch, and speed trials.

With the arrival of the Lusitania - or Lucy - and the Mauretania, Cunard not only reclaimed the Blue Riband, but also cornered the market in luxury and opulence in a way that it had hitherto failed to do.

Cunard began life in 1839, as the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, created ostensibly to win a contract to ship the Royal Mail from Great Britain to Canada and the United States. The business came to be known as the Cunard Company, after founder Samuel Cunard, a Nova Scotian shipping entrapaneur. Inspired by the revolutionary work of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his "mammoth" steam ship the Great Eastern, Cunard, and his business partners George Burns and David McIver, envisioned a network of Transtlantic shipping lanes along the lines of, and completing links between, railways and roads in Europe and America. He realised that ships powered by steam would not depend upon the wind to get them from A to B, and so could operate on a schedule with the same punctuality as the railroads.

Cunard commissioned the construction of five transatlantic steamers, the first of which was the Britannia. In his book The Cunard Story, historian Howard Johnson describes the Britannia as an inelegant paddle steamer, a "two-decker with one tall orange-red funnel amidships." Launched in 1840, the 207-foot long, 1,145 ton Cunarder made her first voyage July 4th that year, sailing from Liverpool bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia and Boston. On board were 63 passengers (including Cunard and the Bishop of Nova Scotia and his family), 93 crew, Her Majesty's Mail, and one cow: the latter to supply fresh milk. The ship was commanded by one Captain Woodruff, R.N., who barked orders at his crew through a speaking trumpet. When the sea was rough it took as many as four sailors to man the ship's wheel. The steamer completed her journey in 12 days and 12 hours, and would go on to hold the record for the fastest eastbound Atlantic crossing. The same journey by sail could take as much as 35 days.

The image left shows the Britannia in full sail. Sails were seldom used as a method of propulsion, but rather to help stabilize the ship in rough weather. The Royal Navy preferred sail to steam until 1869, and transatlantic steam ships kept their sails until the 1880s: the last Cunard ship to have sails was the Etruria, launched in 1884.

In 1842 Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine were passengers aboard the Britannia. According to the ship's passenger list, they set sail from Liverpool bound for Boston, where the 30 year old author was to begin his first tour of the United States. Dickens wrote about the 18 day voyage in some detail, in the second chapter of American Notes. Seemingly something of a gourmand, he included a description of the food served on ship.

At one, a bell rings, and the stewardess comes down with a steaming dish of baked potatoes, and another of roasted apples; and plates of pig’s face, cold ham, salt beef; or perhaps a smoking mess of rare hot collops [slices of meat]. […] At five, another bell rings, and the stewardess reappears with another dish of potatoes - boiled this time - and store of hot meat of various kinds […] We […] prolong the meal with a rather mouldy desert of apples, grapes, and oranges; and drink our wine and brandy-and-water. The bottles and glasses are still upon the table, and oranges and so forth are rolling about, according to their fancy and the ship's way [...] (26-27)

Conditions aboard early Cunard ships were spartan. The cabins were typically eight by six feet, with two bunks, a hard settee, a commode with two wash basins, two water jugs and two chamber pots. Dicken’s described the saloon, where passenger’s dined, as resembling “a gigantic hearse with […] a melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards [warmed] their hands.” (24)

An unnamed passenger travelling from Boston to Liverpool in 1840, wrote to his father that the food was “carried over open decks [and] sometimes cold, […] fresh food for the first three days and thereafter the fish and meat is salted. Britannia has two ice rooms and the fruit is stored there […] During the journey I counted pea soup nine times and the ubiquitous Sea Pie was on the menu everyday.”

Rules on board ship ordered that "state-rooms (cabins) be swept, and carpets taken out and shaken every morning after breakfast. To be washed once a week if the weather is dry. [...] That bedding be turned over as soon as passengers quit their cabins. That slops be emptied and basins cleaned at the same time. Passengers are requested not to open their scuttles [portholes] when there is a chance of their bedding being wetted. [...] The Wine and Spirits Bar will be opened to passengers at 6 a.m., and closed at 11 p.m."

Though the Britannia did have some luxury furnishings, "carpet's and brocades" for instance, these were removed once a voyage began, as the majority of the rooms, corridors and cabins, were soon awash with sea water, and possessions were often soaked. In addition to this passengers suffering from "mal-de-mer" had a habit of "tainting" the finery once the "vessel commenced to roll." Stewards would tend to sea sick passengers, running from cabin to cabin, issuing rations of brandy to the numerous and unfortunate land lubbers. If passengers could stomach it, the bar was open at 6 a.m. and here diners could order steak with a bottle of hock. The Britannia continued to steam back and forth across the Atlantic until she was sold to the North German Navy in 1849, and renamed Barbarossa. She reputedly ended her days rather ignominiously, as a hulk used for target practice, sunk by the Prussian Navy.

What early Cunard ships lacked in luxury, or even comfort, they made up for by being safe and reliable. Cunard steamers were well-built, with experienced and reputable captains and crew, initially hand picked by David McIver, himself a former ship's captain. Dickens, despite not having the most pleasurable of journeys, was, once on dry land, full of praise for the ship's captain, one John Hewitt. He addressed captain Hewitt as a man who would live in the memory, and who had returned his passengers to "the pleasure of those homes and firesides from which they once wandered, and which [...] they might never have regained." Between 1840 and the First World War Cunard lost only three ships. Of those, the Columbia (1841), one of the original five Cunarders, was wrecked off the coast of Seal Island, Halifax, and the Oregon (1883) sank in 1886, with no loss of life (or mail) in either case.

In the 1850s Cunard's main competitors were the Collins Line (or Arctic, Pacific and Baltic Line), founded in 1850 by New Yorker Edward Knight Collins, and the Inman Line, set up in 1850 by William Inman, a shipping company that pioneered transporting emigrants to the New World.

Collins Line ships - notibly the Arctic, Atantic, Pacific and Baltic - were bigger, faster and more luxurious than those of the Cunard fleet, and came with bathrooms, steam-heat, flowered carpets, velvet sofas, and barber shops. The Collins Line was an instant hit, eclipsing the popularity of Cunard, especially as the latter's ships were taken out of service to act as hosptal ships and troop carriers during the Crimean War. The Inman Line introduced two ships, the City of Glasgow and the City of Manchester, both featuring new double iron-screw propulsion, replacing paddles, and freeing up space for more passengers. In 1852 the former was adapted specifically to carry 400 steerage class passengers, the first ship to do so. The Inman Line soon cornered the market in emigrant passengers, and was also a commercial success.

Unfortunately both shipping lines, like many of Cunard's competitors in the mid to late-nineteenth century, were accident-prone. The Collins Line lost the Arctic in 1854, with the loss of 322 lives, including Collins's wife and daughter, and the Pacific, with the loss of 186 lives. The Inman Line was similarly beset with tragedy: between 1854, with the sinking of the City of Glasgow and the loss of 480 lives, a further eight ships were sunk, burnt or wrecked in bad weather. Both companies were heavily hit by these losses and either disappeared or were swallowed up in mergers.

Under pressure from new shipping companies like the White Star Line, Guion, and Norddeutscher Lloyd, Cunard started to focus on offering speed and comfort as well as safety in their passenger liners. The official Cunard web site suggests that "the great international race for supremacy of the North Atlantic" started with the launch of two ships, the Campania and her sister ship, the Lucania, built by the Fairfield Co. Ltd, in Glasgow, and launched in 1893. Each was constructed of steel, weighed 12,950 tonnes, used the latest twin-screw propellors, and had a top speed of 21 knots. They were the biggest and fastest transatlantic ships of their day, carrying 600 First Class, 400 Second Class, and 1000 Third Class passengers.

The Lucania was the first ship to have single birth cabins, and suites (two cabins with a sitting room between them). Each principal room had a fire grate, and the drawing room was decorated with satinwood walls, cedar mouldings, and a ceiling of ivory and guilding. The ship was furnished with Persian carpets, velvet settees and chairs, with brocade, and a grand piano and an American organ. The ladies rooms were scented with freshly cut geraniums, and the Italian-style dining room included Ionic columns and Spanish mahogany walls. First Class passengers could expect to dine on Little Neck Clams, Chicken Okra, Petit Filet de Boeuf ala Parisienne, Timbales a la Richelieu, Roast Qual on Toast a la Monglas, and Neopolitan Ice Cream. Over a breakfast of Broiled Sausages, or Veal Cutlets with Tomato Sauce, passengers could read the very latest news: thanks to onboard experiments by Marconi, the Lucania featured the first ship's newspaper to appear daily with news recieved by wireless.

Despite these advances Cunard still lagged behind her competitors, who continued to build bigger and better ships. Determined to become market leaders once more, Cunard began negotiations with the British government to secure loans to build two massive luxury ocean liners, ones that would capture not only the Blue Riband, but also more passengers. Prime Minister Arthur Balfour gave the go ahead for a state-funded loan to build the Lusitania and the Mauretania, on the proviso that they be constructed to be "convertible to the requirements of the Admiralty as auxillary armed cruisers in time of war." The Lusitania never saw active service: she was sunk by a German U-Boat in 1915, with the loss of 1,198 lives. The Mauretania never became an armed cruiser - she was too big - but spent much of the 1914-18 war transporting troops, most notably 10,000 soldiers to Gallipoli. Later she operated as a hospital ship, finally returning to the North Atantic as a high speed troop carrier, transporting many thousands of US troops to and from the conflict in Europe.

Following the war the Mauretania returned to civilian service, operating between Southampton and New York from 1920 on. Maury became something of a celebrity. In 1922 when the ship returned to the Tyne for a refit thousands of spectators turned out to welcome her home. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man not fond of sea travel, described the ship as having a "soul that you could talk to." Novelist Theodore Dreiser wrote

It was a beautiful thing all told - it's long cherry-wood panelled halls, its heavy porcelain baths, its dainty state rooms fitted with lamps, bureaus, writing desks, wash-stands, closets and the like. [...] the bugler who bugled for dinner! [...] as if to say "This is a very joyous event, ladies and gentlemen. We are all happy; come, come; it is a delightful feast."

The Mauretania was even the inspiration for a song, written by Goodwin and Brown, titled "He's On A Boat That Sailed Last Wednesday (He's Coming Home)." The ship remained Cunard's premier liner for most of the twenties, until 1929, when the Blue Riband was captured by the German liner Bremen. In 1930 the ship's captain opened up the engines and made one last attempt to recapture the record, reaching a creditable 30 knots, but this wasn't quite quick enough. With a new decade the ship's Edwardian fixtures and fittings seemed old fashioned, and so, following a spell cruising the Caribbean, the Mauretania was decommissioned. Steaming past the Tyne and the Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson shipyard, on her way to the breaker's yard in 1935, Maury signalled the men who had built her: "Goodbye, Tyneside. This is my last radio. Closing down for ever. Mauretania." Thousands of people lined the shore, while a flotilla of ships accompanied her on her way, and the assemble crowd sang "Auld Lang Syne." One eye witness reported seeing his father, and dozens of other men like him, who had built the ship, their faces "wet with tears."

Cunard would go on to build bigger, faster and perhaps more famous luxury Express Liners, most notably the ship that was to replace the Mauretania, the Queen Mary, and later the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Elizabeth 2. By the 1950s and 60s, however, with the advent of commercial air travel, the era of the great transatlantic ocean liners was drawing to a close.

Links:

New York Public Library: What's on the Menu?

Ocean Liners -- History

Cunard Steamship Company Ltd.

Tyne and Wear Archives: Mauretania

Search Cunard Ships at the Cunard Heritage web site.

A Selection of images of the interior of the Mauretania, taken from R.M.S. "Lusitania" and "Mauretania" Coronation Booklet, Ed. Deluxe, 1911.

Musical of the Month: Black Crook Archives

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:42:48 -0400

As the month of June draws to a close, it's time to leave The Black Crook and move on to a new Musical of the Month. Before I do, though, I want to take a minute to let those who may have been intrigued by the small samples I’ve posted know how they can find more information about The Black Crook and other historical musicals.

In order to find material related to a musical, you sometimes have to be creative in how you search. For example, most libraries don’t organize material by the title of a play or musical; there is no "Black Crook collection" at NYPL, for instance. Most archival collections come to libraries when a famous person dies and leaves their papers to the institution. These collections are usually kept together and appear in a library catalog only under the name of the person who donated it (e.g. "Richard Rodgers papers"). Sometimes, (actually usually at NYPL), the catalog record will also include a document called a "Finding Aid": a relatively detailed list of the kinds of items in the collection (see, for instance, the Richard Rodgers papers).

Making this sort of list is time consuming, though. For instance, if an archivist finds a bit of untitled handwritten sheet music in the collection of a musical theater performer, it may be a version of a known song from an identified musical, or it may be a draft of something that was never published. The archivist could spend a lot of time researching that one piece from the collection, or could simply label it "untitled sheet music" and move on to the next thing in the collection. Current archival best practice advocates processing collections rapidly to make them available to researchers as quickly as possible, and so most archivists would probably not identify the music. In fact, at very large archives like NYPL, it’s probably most likely the finding aid would simply mention a folder of "Sheet music 1860-1890" and leave it up to the researchers to identify the individual items. Although this can be frustrating to researchers working from a distance, if a more specific finding aid was created for every collection in the library, most collections would simply sit in unprocessed storage--hidden from and unavailable to the public. A careful researcher will probably have to visit the collection and call up potentially interesting boxes of material rather than simply rely on catalog records.

Moreover, for many theatrical pieces archival material is scattered across many libraries. While this can make it difficult for researchers to be sure they have looked at every important document, it also means that even if you don’t live near a major archive like the Library of Congress or New York Public Library, there may be a collection of important documents near where you live! If you’re interested in a particular show, try to find out who owns the papers of everyone connected with it (Where did the orchestrator donate his papers? How about the set designer?). Free databases like WorldCat can be useful in locating these collections, but sometimes a quick chat with the subject librarians at your local University library or Historical Society can uncover material even experts in the field don’t know about (because, of course, they can’t visit EVERY library in the world).

Here is a list of the collections of Black Crook material I know about. Leave a note in the comments if you know of others.

(You can also search other NYPL archival collections here.)

Collection Location Description Maria Bonfanti Collection (New York Public Library) New York City Correspondence, manuscript sheet music, and scrapbook of the premiere ballet dancer in the original production. Programs & Clippings files (New York Public Library) New York City Newspaper clipping about productions the show between 1866-1929. American Sheet Music Collection (New York Public Library): Sheet music (photographed and placed online in my last blog entry) Harry K. Ransom Center Austin, TX Manuscript promptbook, sheet music, newspaper clippings, programs, costume designs. Harvard Theater Collection Cambridge, MA Manuscript promptbook of The Black Crook and other plays by Barras, letters and photographs of Charles Barras, newspaper clippings from the time of the original production. Library of Congress Washington D.C. Published 1867 copy of the script, sheet music, programs, Federal Theater Project typescript Museum of the City of New York New York City Sheet music, photographs, programs, newspaper clippings. Player's Club, Edwin Booth Collection New York City Manuscript promptbook. Victoria and Albert Museum Theater Collection London Papers relating to the London version of The Black Crook (with a completely different plot)

Musical of the Month: The Music of the Black Crook

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 07:43:50 -0400

This is the second in a series of posts about the 1866 proto-musical, The Black Crook. See my first post in the series for additional background on the show

Very little is known about the music used in the original production of The Black Crook. Early advertisements feature the scenic effects (TRANSFORMATION SCENE or THE CRYSTAL CASCADE) much more prominently than the music. Spectacular dances (eg. "Pas de Demons" or "Pas de Fleurs") are sometimes listed as well (albeit in a slightly smaller typeface), but rarely are the songs announced at all. Some 1866 programs cite "music composed expressly for the Piece by Thomas Baker," who is also named as the arranger of a set of published sheet music from 1866, but this music seems to have been underscoring for the dance and lacks lyrics.

This does not mean, though, that the original production did not include songs. Barras’s libretto includes a few lyrics (eg. the choral "Hark! Hark! Hark!" song that concludes Scene 1), but I am unaware of any 19th century music known to accompany it. An early program held by the Museum of the City of New York lists only three songs: one sung by Carline in Act 1, Scene 4 ("You Naughty, Naughty Men") and two by Stalacta in Act 2, Scene 4 ("Flow on Silver Stream" and "The Power of Love"). The sheet music for "You Naughty, Naughty Men" was published with lyrics several times in the 19th century, and copies are held by NYPL and the Library of Congress. A few bars of music labeled "The Power of Love" appear in sheet music for "The Black Crook Waltz," but I’ve been unable to locate any lyrics. There is no indication that any of the music in the Library of Congress or NYPL is part of "Flow On Silver Stream."

Some of the songs in the original production might be included in "The Black Crook Songster," published in 1867 and held by NYPL. (Songsters were published collections of lyrics centered on a particular theme.) Given that the book includes over 50 songs, it seems unlikely that every one was sung in The Black Crook, but the title page draws special attention to the inclusion of "You Naughty, Naughty Men," which was "sung at Niblo’s Garden with great applause" (it makes no such claim about any of the other lyrics). Still, advertisements in 19th century papers suggest that the music changed frequently during the course of the original production, so it is possible other lyrics in the songster found their way into the show.

Unfortunately, 21st century audiences have had very few opportunities to hear any of the music associated with The Black Crook. Indeed, the only commercially available recording I know of is a Kentucky brass band's performance of an instrumental version of "You Naughty, Naughty Men," recorded on their album with samples on their website. So, dear readers with musical ability, I issue you a challenge. Below I have linked to sheet music from the Library of Congress and NYPL. If you want to make this all but forgotten score accessible to your fellow musical theater fans, play through the piano music or sing the lyrics to "You Naughty, Naughty Men" in a YouTube video and leave a link in the comments. I’ll feature the best performances in my next post.

Note: Unlike the images in the Digital Gallery, I personally photographed the sheet music below at a relatively low resolution with a hand-held digital camera. I hope eventually to have these objects photographed at a higher quality by NYPL's professional photographers, but in the interest of providing access as quickly as possible, I provide these images "as is."

Title Source Page Turner PDF Black Crook Gallop Library of Congress View Download Fairy Queen March Library of Congress View Download March of the Amazons Library of Congress View Download Transformation Polka Library of Congress View Download You Naughty, Naughty Men Library of Congress View Download You Naughty, Naughty Men (another copy) Library of Congress Library Page Turner Download Black Crook Lancers NYPL View Download Black Crook Waltz NYPL View Download Black Crook Waltz (second copy) NYPL View Download Black Crook Waltz (third copy) NYPL View Download Black Crook Waltzes (with color cover) NYPL View Download Black Crook Waltzes (second copy, just music) NYPL View Download March of the Amazons NYPL View Download Mazeri Mazurka NYPL View Download Transformation Polka from dance collection NYPL View Download Transformation Polka (second copy) NYPL View Download

Musical of the Month: The Black Crook

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:42:39 -0400

Most musical theater history books cautiously locate the birth of the American Musical at Niblo's Garden (a theater once located on Prince Street) on September 12, 1866 at the opening of The Black Crook. Of course, among many scholars, this identification is regarded as something of a joke — song had been integrated into plays since the early days of Greek drama, and the songs in The Black Crook, at least in its original version, were mostly diversions from the plot — no more related to the action and characters than commercial breaks are to an episode of Glee. Nonetheless, for all the very good reasons to reject The Black Crook as the first American Musical, no one alternative has been widely accepted, and so it seems as good a place as any to begin this series.

The story of the original production of The Black Crook is steeped in legend as dramatic as the plot of the play and has served as a basis for at least two musicals itself. Although the details of early histories vary, most agree on the essential facts: a European ballet troupe in New York was left without a theater when their intended venue, the Academy of Music, burned to the ground. The producers, Henry Jarrett and Harry Palmer, made an arrangement with William Wheatley, the manager of Niblo's Garden, to integrate both the ballet and the spectacular stage machinery they had brought over from Europe into a Faustian melodrama that he was about to produce. The opening night ran for over six hours, which perhaps explains the multiple cuts marked in almost every extant 19th century prompt book.

Despite a rocky opening night, the production enjoyed phenomenal success, particularly after The New York Herald published an op-ed piece "condemning" the play for the indecency of the costumes and dancing, suggesting that there may have been "in Sodom and Gomorrah [...] such a theatre and spectacle on the Broadway of those doomed cities," and urging those "determined to gaze on the indecent and dazzling brilliancy of the Black Crook" to "provide themselves with a piece of smoked glass." However, Joseph Whitton, William Wheatley's business manager, explains in his short history of the play, the editor of The New York Herald was likely aware that such condemnation would promote the show and was rewarding Wheatley for his loyalty to the paper. The moral crusade against the show was taken up by Reverend Charles Smyth who preached a fire and brimstone sermon against it as part of a public lecture series. All of this, of course, simply increased public interest in the play, which ran for over a year, toured, and was revived for the remainder of the 19th century.

The text of The Black Crook was clearly not what made it popular. Indeed, when an unscrupulous producer mounted an unlicensed imitation of the play (called The Black Rook) in 1867, a California circuit court judge dismissed any similarities or differences in the text of the two versions as irrelevant, arguing "A play like this has no value except as it is appreciated by the theatre-going public. It cannot be read — it is a mere spectacle, and must be seen to be appreciated." Business manager Joseph Whitton put it more succinctly when he concluded his history by noting, "I have said nothing of the literary merits of the Crook, for the best of reasons — it had none." However, Whitton goes on to write:

This, however, is no serious fault. Elegant writing, with its daintily picked words and smooth-flowing sentences, is all well enough in its place; but that place is not in the drama of this prosy, money-grabbing age. The playgoer doesn't relish it. What he wants is something to please his eye and tickle his ear — something to strangle his cares and cut the throat of his troubles — something to make him laugh and forget he has a note to pay to-morrow, with no money to meet it. This is what he is after, and shrewd managers will show their shrewdness by accommodating him.

These sentiments seem so familiar and strangely modern that maybe, just maybe, calling The Black Crook the first American musical isn't so terribly off the mark after all.

A note on the ebook edition:

I originally transcribed the text of the ebook below from the Federal Theater Project typescript in the Library of Congress, which I then edited to reflect the text of the 1866 prompt book held by NYPL. In an effort to make a readable text, I have not attempted to reproduce the marginalia describing staging, sound, and light cues, and have removed empty parenthesis that follow most references to "Music" [eg. Music ( ) ]. Those interested in this textual information will be able to find it in the digital images of the prompt book that have just been produced and will soon be available in the Library's Digital Gallery.

You can download the libretto of The Black Crook (transcribed from the NYPL prompt book) in the following formats:

File type What it's for EPUB (Most ebook readers, except Kindle) PDF (Computer and Kindle) HTML (Web browser) Plain text (Almost any digital device) TEI (Digital Humanities geeks)

This entry inaugurates the 12-month series I described in my last blog post: Musical of the Month. Each month I will post the libretto of an important early American musical in a variety of formats and supplement it with associated photographs, vocal scores, and the occasional audio file.

Announcing: Musical of the Month

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Wed, 18 May 2011 06:36:13 -0400

Growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, my favorite part of the week was visiting the Florissant Valley Public Library and checking out cast recordings. I remember flipping through the bins of LPs, staring down at the big black album with glowing cat eyes, and wondering what in the world that show might be about. It was always a little disappointing when the liner notes were missing or the plot summaries were particularly sparse. In such cases, I would make up a story to fit between the songs (which led to some surprises when I finally saw these shows in their entirety). Sometimes I would go to the shelves to try to find a libretto, but, with the exception of the titles in Stanley Richard's excellent Great Musicals of the American Theater anthologies, I was usually unsuccessful.

Now I work in a library that has the text (often in multiple versions) of nearly every Broadway show produced in the last 100 years. We have audio recordings of shows I've never heard of and the Theater on Film and Tape Archive preserves a large portion of the last 30 years of professional New York (and some regional) theater. I can't help but think, though, about the new versions of my younger self, who live in places with libraries perhaps even less well-stocked than the one of my childhood. I'm also struck by the number of times I have received a mass email to theater scholars with a plea from a University professor asking "Does anybody know where I can find a copy of the libretto of [a semi-obscure, older musical]."

So, I'm instituting a new blog series I'm calling the Musical of the Month. My plan is to publish on this blog an electronic edition of a libretto about once a month in formats you can read online, on your smart phone, or on most ebook readers. In some cases I'll also be able to provide digitized images of piano/vocal scores for at least a few songs. Additionally, for each play, I'll provide a short history of the original production, explanatory notes for references that may be obscure to modern readers, as well as links to additional related material digitized from library collections (either at NYPL or elsewhere) and links commercial material (such as cast recordings) available for purchase.

By the end of the year I hope there will be about semester's worth of material that could serve as a kind of textbook for early musical theater history. To begin with, the plays will necessarily be selected from out-of-copyright titles (that is, texts published before 1923). My hope, though, is that arrangements may eventually be made with intellectual property holders to make accessible some later texts as well. I will begin next month with the 1866 musical that many early historians called (for very questionable reasons) the first American musical. As a preview, you can check out Harvard's copy of an early promptbook for the play. Enjoy!

Hold the Applause! Testimonial Menus

Rebecca Federman, Collections Strategy, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building — Thu, 12 May 2011 11:50:19 -0400

Perhaps you’ve noticed a few more people joining the menu party lately. The Buncombe County Medical Association is here. As are our friends from the National Life Insurance Company. We’ve even extended an invite to our canine crew (and their owners) from the Philadelphia Dog Show Association.

Clubs, organizations, companies, and associations often hosted an annual dinner, usually at a hotel or large restaurant, to reflect on the year’s accomplishments and perhaps to recruit new members, but their menus differ widely. Some, like the National Life Insurance Co., treated its members to a wide variety of foods, from sweetbread croquettes to lobster salad. Others, like the dog show, kept the food offerings simple with the ubiquitous Blue Points and Waldorf Salad.

But some of these menus go well beyond the one-pager or folder, and flirt with the size of a pamphlet, managing to fit in addition to the menu, toasts, songs, names of board members, hymns, psalms, and much more into a complete souvenir program. Like this example from dinner by the St. George's Society in New York in 1900. Far more than a menu, this booklet includes not only toasts to the Queen and to the President of the United States, but to the Day, to the Land, to the Colonies, to the Sister Societies, and (finally) to the Ladies. And for those who need a little extra help, lyrics to God Save the Queen and The Star Spangled Banner.

Or this graphically arresting menu from the National Shorthand Reporters Banquet, also in 1900, held at Hotel Victory in Lake Erie, Ohio.

The menu of mock turtle, Philadelphia capon, Roman punch, and Petits Fours is fairly standard. The after-dinner speaking program, on the other hand, is anything but short, featuring such riveting discussions such as “Friendship among stenographers” by Dr. Rudolf Tombo of New York, and "Who are these stenographers?" by W.H. Macfeat of Columbia, South Carolina.

Important note to menu transcribers!

While these menus contain a wealth of information beyond the food (musicians, artists, popular songs of the time, organizations that no longer exist today), our goal (for now!) is to capture the food and dishes served at these events and not to worry about capturing every name, toast, speech, or Shakespearean quote, regardless of how interesting they may be (and they are!).

So as you transcribe pickles, potato croquettes, Delmonico potatoes, and sherbet, feel free to explore the social, literary, and professional worlds inhabited by these groups and organizations ... just don’t, as it were, "make a note" of them.

The Queen B: Miss Buttolph and Her Menus

Rebecca Federman, Collections Strategy, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 08:05:44 -0400

If you've transcribed even one menu, you've likely seen her stamp. A blue oval bearing her name, "Buttolph Collection", as graceful as a branding iron over asparagus, Russian caviar, or Boston baked beans.

Miss Frank E. Buttolph stamped nearly every menu she collected for the New York Public Library, twenty-three years worth, amounting to roughly 25,000 menus under her tenure alone.

But who was Miss Buttolph and why did she collect menus?

Neither question is easy to answer. We know from records that she was about fifty when she began her menu project, she was educated (she translated Tasso), and she was an avid collector of postcards with lighthouses.

Her most notable collection, her menu collection, began on January 1, 1900, with lunch. In a letter dated February 14, 1900 she writes:

"On New Year's Day I stopped in the Columbia Restaurant for lunch and thought it might be interesting to file a bill of fare at the library. A week later the thought occured, why not preserve others? As a result 930 have passed through my fingers to the Astor Library."

By August, Miss Buttolph was taking out ads in hotel and restaurant trade journals soliciting menus from their readership. This ad from Hotel Monthly (August, 1900) stresses the physical condition of the menus, or cards:

"It is of the highest importance the cards should be well wrapped and then placed between stiff card-board of a larger size, else they are sure to be soiled and broken in the mail, which condition renders them worthless. One beauty of this collection is, nearly all of the 3,600 cards [in the collection] are perfect, but I have had had to fight harder then Gen. Otis did in the Philippines to keep my standard in position. When it has to be lowered I shall discontinue the work."

The full ad is reproduced below:

Miss Buttolph's colorful personality, which is suggested in the ad, was both the reason for her success and the cause of her downfall. Her diligence in hunting down menus (writing to restaurants, putting up advertisements, and speaking to the press), and her commitment to high quality (she did not hesitate to send menus back if they did not meet her standards) insured that the Library's collection was both comprehensive and pristine.

However, even though she was never an employee of the Library, Miss Buttolph's idiosyncricies and negative behavior ("Is this museum maintained by the city to afford whistling space for the cleaners, instead of for students?) upset many on staff and in the Library administration who felt that her behavior was too disruptive ("[Miss Buttolph] is contantly complaining about something and when she gets started, it is almost impossible to get rid of her.")

Miss Buttolph was dismissed from NYPL in 1923. She died of pneumonia at Bellevue Hospital the following year, on February 27, 1924.

* * *

Despite her tumultuous relationship with the Library, her committment to her collection never wavered. In one of her last letters to the administration, she writes:

"For many years my library work has been the only thing I had to live for. It was my heart, my soul, my life. Always before me was the vision of students of history, who would say 'thank you' to my name and memory...."

Thank you, Miss Buttolph. Your incredible stamp continues to be felt, indeed.

Continue transcribing her collection on What's on the Menu?

New Feature! Unlock Menus to Continue Editing

Ben Vershbow, Manager, NYPL Labs — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 08:43:34 -0400

We've gotten a number of questions over the past week of What's on the Menu? about menus marked as "done." Do we really mean done? As in finished, vetted, archived for posterity? Fear not, we've cleared up this confusion with some new language. What we really meant to say was "under review."

On several occasions, a volunteer e-mailed us saying they'd spotted errors, or missing dishes, on menus marked as complete. I happily re-opened the menus in question (a facility only open to site administrators) and invited them to continue their work. After doing this a few times ad hoc, we decided to just add this as a feature.

Now, for any menu you find that's under review, you can click the little lock icon to its left to re-open it for further editing, correcting or transcribing. So if you are feel like donning your proofreader's glasses, we invite you to dive into the menus formerly known as finished to hunt out typos and problematic transcriptions (as ameliorated by these helpful tips), or to insert decimal points in the price fields to bring the cost of living and dining down to appropriate circa 1900 levels (as required, say, in this menu), or other tidying and correcting tasks not yet anticipated. Don't forget to re-submit the menu for review (via the button below the dishes list, left sidebar) when you're "done"!

And then what?

As is often the case in libraries, and on the always-evolving web, the work is never completely and totally done. For the menus, finishing transcription is in fact just the beginning of a long and only partially mapped out journey of data cleanup and rectification — not to mention subsequent tasks we may open up, such as the identification of sections (appetizers, desserts), categorization (breakfast menu, dinner menu), and other things still TBD.

Our philosophy all along has been to launch the project as openly and simply as possible, build a big data pile, and then to start finding solutions for navigating and improving the data. Any brave souls who want to jump in now to start polishing and tweaking are more than welcome! Please report back any common issues that you find (in the comments field below or via e-mail at menus@nypl.org).

We're also racing to post a detailed Help page, much of it informed by valuable user feedback, and soon, we expect, by the forthcoming insights of menu unlockers as well. The key is in your hands!

Go to What's on the Menu?

Tricky Menu Tips: Ditto Marks, Prices, and More

Rebecca Federman, Collections Strategy, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:42:16 -0400

Wow. We're sitting here with our mouths agape, simply overwhelmed --and thrilled! -- by the response to What's on the Menu? We knew you guys liked food, but holy (broiled) mackerel!

We launched WOTM very quietly, just three days ago, and, as of this typing, we have over 22K dishes transcribed! And it's evident, from the emails and tweets we've been receiving, that we have some very enthusiastic participants out there. Thank you!

But as you may have noticed, each menu is very different. Each has its quirks and idiosyncricies. Some have clear prices, some don't have any. Some have odd language, some are very straightforward. Some use ditto marks to convey the same dish, others repeat, repeat, repeat.

The following are some tips to think about while transcribing that I hope will clear up confusion, but please send us more questions as they come, either in the comments section of this post, to our menus@nypl.org community hotline, or through the Twitterverse @nypl_menus. Your questions and comments help us build a better and more robust site! We may add to this post over time, and all of it will serve as a draft for a more robust Help section on the menus site, coming soon. Meantime, here's some advice on navigating some of the more common snags.

Is a menu totally finished if it reads "done"?

Not quite. Every menu will go through a vetting process, where we will clean up any mixed-up prices, misspellings, etc. If it reads "done" it goes into a queue so that a NYPL staff member can review it. We haven't begun that review in earnest yet, but we're taking careful notes during this experimental first phase. Who knows, we may even re-open some of the menus at a later time for second-pass cleanup. Based on feedback, we're considering adjusting the status language to something like "locked for review." That may clear up the confusion.

Making sense of cents

Believe it or not, a sirloin steak can cost as little as 25 cents. Crazy, I know. But some menus also include pricier items, such as a $2.50 Terrapin, Maryland. Therefore, we've defaulted the currency to dollars (if the menu is from the U.S.) and we're asking everyone to adjust accordingly. If a steak is 25 cents, please mark as .25 Obviously if you mess up (or see someone else mess up) it will be cleaned up later, but it always helps us to add that little decimal point.

What's the deal with the ditto?

Have you transcribed any bills of fare from a coffee shop or oyster bar? If so, you've probably enountered menus with ditto marks (") as in:

Eggs, Fried

", Poached

", Soft-Boiled

When transcribing a menu and coming across the ditto (sometimes the menu will read "do", too), it helps to think of each dish as a discrete item which will be added to a huge database in which one can pull up a specific dish, across all menus. Therefore, it's enormously helpful to have Eggs, Poached reflected instead ", Poached. So, please don't use the ditto. Instead, please retype the original food offering in-full. But again, no sweat, we'll be cleaning up as we go, too.

Halving it all

Like the ditto mark, when coming across a dish that advertises a half chicken, or something prepared two ways, make two discrete entries. So instead of entering "chicken, half chicken", please enter the chicken twice, as in: "chicken" and "half chicken." That also goes for menu options on the same line. So, "oatmeal or hominy" should read "oatmeal" and "hominy."

When in dish doubt, don't leave it out!

Still not sure? Email us! menus@nypl.org

Go to What's on the Menu?

Doin' the Dishes!

Rebecca Federman, Collections Strategy, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 11:33:26 -0400

Saratoga Chips. Corned Beef Hash. Large Pot of Oolong Tea.

Okay, so they’re not included in the works of Shakespeare (as far as I know), but that doesn’t mean these dishes aren't of value to researchers and scholars and the generally curious who read menus in order to learn more about the food served and consumed in restaurants throughout history.

But until now this kind of information (the food!) was difficult - if not impossible - to search in our digitized menu collection.

Yes, you can search “oyster”, but you’ll get “Oyster Bay” instead of saddlerocks, or “Shanley Bros. Oyster House” instead of blue points. In other words you get the location and restaurant name, but not the very content (the food!) of the menu.

So we’ve built a website where you can tell us “What’s on the Menu?” and help create what we like to call a “database of dishes.” From your transcriptions, I hope we can learn about the foods of the last century to see what these historic menus can teach us about the culinary landscape today. Here are some items I’m excited to track over the next few months:

Tutti-frutti
Rise and fall of oysters
Vichy water
Battle Creek Sanitarium dishes
Moselle wine

And this is just the beginning! We'll be following many more foods and wines from these unique primary sources of our dining history. So help us “do the dishes” and we can all reap the rewards.

Go to What's on the Menu? and jump in!

Candide 2.0: A Reading Experiment Begins

Alice Boone, Curator, 'Candide at 250: Scandal and Success' — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:52:15 -0500

For the next ten weeks, the New York Public Library will host a public, interactive reading of Candide, in connection to its ongoing exhibition at 42nd St.. This edition will look familiar to readers who remember the story, or even just its famous lines about “the best of all possible worlds” and “we must cultivate our garden.” But the innovative format, which facilitates reader annotations and discussions in the digital margins, will also yield surprises, as we have taken that closing line and used it as inspiration for a “cultivated” edition, with “seeds” of discussion sown by readers, opening up the text for public participation. We are thus extending the invitation to NYPL readers to add to these annotations: to make our garden grow, to paraphrase Leonard Bernstein.

To begin the annotation-cultivation of Candide, Nicholas Cronk, president of the Voltaire Foundation at Oxford, takes a new look at the opening chapter of the book, noting how what seems like a familiar narrative structure of the story immediately becomes unsettling, as the narrator disappears in the first paragraph (click "text" link at end of quote to jump to this place in the book):

“The narrator leaves us on our own after this brief and apparently pointless appearance. We are not, after all, to be guided through the story; the narrator has let us down by stealing any old plot from Tom Jones; nothing is quite as it seems; and we are on our own, left to make sense of things as best we can…” [text »]

Candide has been expelled from his family castle in Westphalia and has lost his love, Cunegonde. He has some questionable guidance from his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, whose metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology insists on a circular understanding of cause and effect: “the nose is formed for spectacles—thus we have spectacles!” [text »]

Cronk shows how the examples Pangloss uses to support his philosophy are designed to appeal to the Baron’s small universe in his Westphalia castle:

“The argument from design is meant to prove the existence of God: here it only proves the existence of German barons.”

The narrative perspective—through Candide’s eyes— shows both the limitations of the naïve hero’s experience and the universality/banality of the Panglossian system, as Candide describes “this best of all possible worlds, [as] the Baron's castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses” [text »] and Pangloss as “the greatest philosopher of the whole province, and consequently of the whole world.” [text »]

Cronk asks what we are to make of these repeated phrases—“sufficient reason,” “cause and effect,” “best of all possible…” The repetition is humorous, but more than humor is involved. Cronk puts it, “It seems that the more we play with these terms, the more they lead a life of their own.” [text »]

It was a similar sense of how Candide’s philosophical debates and peripatetic travels were adapted and led lives of their own that inspired my own interests as curator of the NYPL Candide at 250: Scandal and Success exhibit in Wachenheim Gallery. I saw a counter-history of the novel in the way that its readers had transformed it, as if its canoncity were reflected in a funhouse mirror: the odder iterations of the story (Esperanto experiments, 1960s countercultural rambles, contemporary human rights campaigns) could be encapsulated in the opening line of the second chapter: “Candide, driven from terrestrial paradise, walked a long while without knowing where…” [text »]

With Candide’s errant wandering as my inspiration, I became interested in the errors that the text has picked up in its 250 years of translation. For example, in some translations, the Bulgars become Bulgarians; the puerile wordplay on Bulgars/buggery (in reference to Frederick the Great) [text »] would have been familiar to some readers, but it did not translate for others who did not consider the context. Most translation differences, of course, should not be seen as errors, as translations have wandered around a (supposed) central or original sense with different emphases, references, overtones, and felicities of language—vagaries of translation that are new sources of life for the text.

For this annotation project, we have used a public domain translation available in digital form. If it is not the best of all possible translations, it nevertheless facilitates what could be the best of all possible discussions, as the annotating facilities at each paragraph allow interested readers to communicate with others about how translation choices affect reading.

The history of Candide is a history of adaptation for different cultural periods and different philosophical and political arguments. Playwright Stanton Wood has updated the story to the past 10 years of world events in his Candide Americana with Rabbit Hole Ensemble, which showed at the NYC Fringe Festival in 2009. In Wood’s retelling, the Seven Years War becomes the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and Candide witnesses the fall of the World Trade Center on September 11, Hurricane Katrina, and other events. In his annotations to chapter 3, Wood reflects on the relevance of eighteenth-century philosophy to considering contemporary events. Wood uses another type of counter-history as his inspiration: Susan Nieman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002). [text »]

Wood is also attuned to the strangeness of the story when he notes Candide’s encounter with a miserly preacher who advocates charity: “Incorporating this kind of ironic moment into the natural flow of the action was one of the challenges of adaptation - every moment in the book seems to include an example of someone saying one thing while doing the opposite in a particularly delicious way.” [text »]

Like Cronk, Wood is interested in how the features we expect to see in a novel—here, a genuinely nice character in Jacques the Anabaptist—disappear almost immediately. [text »]

What is the effect of these destabilizing devices in these early chapters: baits and switches, irony, and wandering as novelistic structure? What do they reveal about Voltaire’s work in the conte philosophique, the philosophical tale? How do these devices lend themselves to further adaptation?

Drawing on the Past: Enlivening the Study of Historical Geography at maps.nypl.org

Matt Knutzen, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Map Division — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:50:12 -0500

On behalf of The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, the NYPL’s Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship and our partners EntropyFree LLC, I am proud to announce the launch of maps.nypl.org

This new website is a parallel snapshot of all maps currently available on the Digital Gallery as well as a powerful set of tools designed to significantly enhance the way we access and use maps and the cartographic information they contain.

The first such enhancement is in how historic maps are viewed. The user interface of maps.nypl.org allows zooming and panning in a way that has come to be expected by users of web maps (Google Maps, Bing Maps etc...)

The next is georectification, which we are calling here “warping”, a familiar term to GIS professionals and few others. Map “warping” is the process where digital images of maps are stretched, placing the maps themselves into their geographic context, rendered either on the website or with tools such as Google Earth.

Illustrated here is the 1915 Redraft of the 1660 Castello Plan documenting early lower Manhattan, “warped” using the Map Warper and rendered in Google Earth.

And below here, a set of 98 detailed sheet maps of the New York City published by William Perris in the early 1850s, overlaid in Google Earth after having been “warped” and mosaicked using maps.nypl.org

Once historical map has been digitally “warped,” users of the Library’s digital maps can virtually “trace” features, such as cities, farm boundaries, rivers, ponds and even buildings, converting them into digital geospatial data. And that data, in turn can be easily linked to other digital information, such as building photographs, text citations or any other information that relates to the same geographic location.

Illustrated below is a photo of Phenix Bank at 45 Wall Street, digitally “pinned” to one of the maps in the series shown above.

One of the most exciting aspects of this project is its participatory nature, meaning that anybody with a computer can create an account, log in, and begin warping and tracing maps, whether for a school or personal project or otherwise. And when the project is complete, the contribution remains in place (à la Wikipedia and openstreetmap.org ), adding one more piece to this new historical geographic data model.

I’ll blog again about some of the ways maps.nypl.org is already being employed by a variety of user groups. Also, follow us on twitter for project updates and events.

For now, however, feel free to create an account, watch the how to video, and enjoy.

World Series warm-up: historic New York-Philadelphia baseball images on Flickr

Ben Vershbow, Manager, NYPL Labs — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:28:26 -0400

The 2009 World Series brings together two cities uncommonly rich in baseball history. Though you might guess which team NYPL is rooting for this year, we've posted a selection of images on The Commons on Flickr representing a variety of New York and Philadelphia ball clubs of yore.

Some of the game's earliest years are chronicled in over 500 photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations donated in 1921 to the New York Public Library by early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding (whose name to this day is printed across every ball used in the National League). As the contemporary Yankees and Phillies clash on the field, here you'll find Philadelphia Quakers, Athletics and Keystones in a gentlemanly mix with New York Giants, Knickerbockers and Metropolitans, and of course Brooklyn Excelsiors and Atlantics. Each one of these images of course has an enormous back story, which we hope the baseball history buffs among you will help fill in through comments, links, tags and annotations. Also check out a smaller set, Proto-baseball, which gathers images of baseball's ball-and-stick forebears like cricket and Old Cat. Here's "Six boys with a ball and three bats, playing Three Old Cat":

We also invite you to explore the full Spalding Collection on the NYPL Digital Gallery and through this finding aid (PDF) from the Manuscripts and Archives Division. Now let's just pray for the rain to stop so Game 1 can get underway... ***UPDATE*** Picked up by Gothamist!

Mapping New York's Shoreline: The Storied River

Matt Knutzen, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Map Division — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:42:37 -0400

Staff of the New York Public Library recently hand picked a set of nearly 500 images, collected from across our Digital Gallery, composing them as a curated set of images at the Commons on Flickr. They represent the Hudson River Valley through several hundred years of history and complement Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009, now up in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The images depict landscape scenes in stereoscopic vision, a popular 19th century format; everyday and commemorative menus from restaurants and catering halls; postcards of scenic places and buildings; and engravings of important estates, prominent citizens and dramatic turning points in historical events. These images have been geocoded and are part of map-based bibliography, The Storied River, coming soon to the NYPL. Stay tuned, the launch will be posted on the NYPL's map blog...

In the meantime, enjoy the same photos at the Commons on Flickr, perused as a gallery of images... Mapping New York's Shoreline: The Storied River ...or, my favorite, pinned to a map on the Flickr website.

Learn more about the NYPL Map Division.

General Motors and Chrysler images on Flickr Commons

Ben Vershbow, Manager, NYPL Labs — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:16:32 -0400

As we watch with astonishment the "restructuring" of two American automotive titans, take a look back at the first four decades of their history, a time which saw multiple breaking waves of innovation in both engineering and design, and a steady absorption of manufacturing brands into the conglomerates we now see in crisis today.

Over the years, General Motors Corporation donated photographs and related materials as a public service to contemporary and future researchers, and to create an ongoing record of the company's output. The Library, in turn, mounted these photographs and texts in albums. General Motors was one of several transportation corporations that donated public relations materials to the Library department that is now the Science, Industry and Business Library. The General Motors holding is particularly comprehensive. See here the first Oldsmobile (1897)!

NYPL's latest contribution to the Flickr Commons is a group of 425 images from these albums, ported over from our Digital Gallery and organized into six Flickr sets and one overall collection: G.M. and Chrysler Cars and Trucks, 1897-1938. Peppered through some of them you'll find the ghostly portraits of engineers long gone, and delightful staged shots of motorists in action.

Spread the word and enjoy!

Milstein joins the Flickr Commons!

Tue, 19 May 2009 08:24:20 -0400

Just last week, the New York Public Library updated their Flickr Commons photostream. The newest images are from the Milstein Division and include construction photographs of the Woolworth Building as well as block by block street views of both Fifth Avenue (1911) and Broadway (1899).

Not only are these images aesthetically beautiful, they are also valuable historical objects which are useful for historians and genealogists alike. The latter two collections allow detailed study of the storefronts that peppered the sidewalks of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Chances are you may also spot an ancestor’s shop if they conducted business there during the turn of the century.

Since joining the Commons late last year the New York Public Library has been met with an enthusiastic response from the Flickr community. Additionally some of the comments we have received have enriched our understanding of our collections. Having our items within Flickr Commons also makes them available for other creative purposes. We look forward to viewing future comments and innovative reuse of our collections!

What's Your Inspiration? Design by the Book Flickr Group!

Jessica Pigza, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Rare Book Division — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:47:31 -0400

Did you enjoy following the adventures of our Design by the Book artists as they found inspiration at NYPL? Do you want to dig in to the Library's collections too, to find materials to fuel your own creativity? If so, then check out my User's Guide to NYPL for DIY Designers and Artisans--it will get you up to speed on the treasures and the quirks of the entire Library system. And with it in hand you can start your own hunt for inspiring stuff.

Once you get started in your handmade endeavors, please join our Design by the Book Group on Flickr! It’s an open group, and you can post pictures of your creations there, along with a caption explaining the part that NYPL played in your project! Here's one completed project from the Design by the Book Group (thanks, egoldberg.rm, for sharing!)--a vintage image in the Library's Digital Gallery has been remade into a lovely blue-hued sunprint: Now it's your turn! Get making and start sharing--I'll do the same!