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In this collection of interviews with Mark Eden Horowitz, Stephen Sondheim expounds in great depth and detail on his craft. As a natural teacher, thoughtful and opinionated, Sondheim discusses the art of musical composition, lyric writing, the collaborative process of musical theater, and how he thinks about his own work. Preserving the essential elements of the previous volumes, this edition includes all of the…

Selected by former Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize–winner Tracy K. Smith, the fifty poems in American Journal explore and expound the diversity and character of America and her people. Taking its title from a poem by Robert Hayden, the first African American appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, American Journal investigates our time with curiosity, wonder,…

Baseball, the sport that helped reunify the country in the years after the Civil War, remains the national pastime. The Library of Congress houses the world’s largest baseball collection, documenting the history of the game and providing a unique look at America since the late 1700s. Now Baseball Americana presents the best of the best from that treasure trove. From baseball’s biggest stars to…

Although new technologies appear poised to alter it, the library remains a powerful site for discovery, and its form is still determined by the geometry of the book and the architectural spaces devised to store and display it. American Libraries provides a history and panorama of these much-loved structures, inside and out, encompassing the small personal collection, the vast university library, and everything in…

Selected from the Letters About Literature contest of the Library of Congress Center for the Book, the fifty-two letters in this collection—written by students in grades four through twelve—reveal how deeply books and poetry affect the lives of readers. Offering letters that are as profound as they are personal and as moving as they are enlightening, this collection provides a glimpse into young people’s…

From August 1914 through March 1917, Americans were increasingly horrified at the unprecedented destruction of the First World War. While sending massive assistance to the conflict ‘s victims, most Americans opposed direct involvement. Their country was immersed in its own internal struggles, including attempts to curb the power of business monopolies, reform labor practices, secure proper treatment for millions of recent immigrants, and expand…

From Shakespeare’s First Folio to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, celebrate the power of the written word and the enduring magic of our most beloved books with this magnificent volume from the Library of Congress.Featuring hundreds of images of original catalog cards, early edition book covers—including Aesop’s Fables, The Catcher in the Rye, Ulysses, The Cat in the Hat, and The Adventures of Huckleberry…

From the 1920s to the 1950s, American pictorial maps were among the most original cartographic creations produced anywhere in the world. Picturing America is the first work of its kind to examine this bold art form, emblemized by renderings of skyscraper cities, enormous industrial factories, streamlined trains, airplanes, and automobiles—all depicted with the verve of comic books, Hollywood movies, and art deco design. Drawing…

This book explores how the Arab art of papermaking by hand came to the Italian peninsula in the thirteenth century and why the city of Fabriano was well-positioned to develop as the heart of this artisan craft. Sylvia Rodgers Albro describes details of the technical advancements introduced by Fabriano papermakers, including machinery and equipment, the use of watermarks, and improvements in the physical processes…

Danish-born Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914) found success in America as a reporter for the New York Tribune, first documenting crime and later turning his eye to housing reform. As tenement living conditions became unbearable in the wake of massive immigration, Riis and his camera captured some of the earliest, most powerful images of American urban poverty. This important publication is the first comprehensive study…

In 1938 the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress dispatched Alan Lomax to complete a folklife survey of the Great Lakes region. He returned almost three months later with a cache of 250 discs and 8 reels of film. These materials documented the diversity of ethnicity—Irish, Finnish, Serbian, Polish, German, Croatian, Canadian French, Hungarian, and more—in Michigan, as well as cultural…

This volume is the first scholarly publication on the Schöner Sammelband, a collection of maps and notes made by the Nuremberg astronomer and mathematician Johannes Schöner (1477–1547). Although it is well known that Schöner owned the original 1507 and 1516 World Maps made by Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, very little research has focused on how he used them and on the origins of…

More than fifty years ago, on a trip dubbed “the Southern Journey,” Alan Lomax visited Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee, uncovering the little-known southern backcountry and blues music that we now consider uniquely American. Lomax’s camera was a constant companion, and his images of both legendary and anonymous folk musicians complement his famous field recordings. These photographs—largely unpublished—show musicians making music with…

In this engaging collection, an eminent group of film historians sheds new light on the incredible life and legacy of Mary Pickford, cinema’s first great star. Pickford is revealed as a gifted actress, a philanthropist, and a savvy industry leader who fought for creative control of her films and ultimately became her own producer.This beautifully designed volume features more than two hundred illustrations, including…

A century ago, New York philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff purchased an initial collection of nearly 10,000 Hebrew books and pamphlets from bibliophilie Ephraim Deinard for the Library of Congress. This gift formed the nucleus of what is today one of the world’s greatest collections of Hebraic materials and Judaica. Perspectives on the Hebraic Book comprises the texts of the Myron M. Weinstein Memorial Lectures…

In AD 1512, at a period in which the number of manuscripts copied in the Armenian language was relatively low, Hakob Meghapart (Jakob the Sinner) created the first Armenian Press in Venice, Italy, and published the first printed Armenian book, the Urbatagirk‘ (The Book of Fridays). His action inaugurated what would become a rich printed literary tradition and would lead to a rebirth of…

Told through unforgettable first-person accounts, photographs, and other primary sources, this book is an overview of racial segregation and early civil rights efforts in the United States from the 1890s to 1954, a period known as the Jim Crow years. Multiple perspectives are examined as the book looks at the impact of legal segregation and discrimination on the day-to-day life of Black and white…

The Library of Congress Illustrated Timeline of the Civil War is an authoritative and engaging narrative of the domestic conflict that determined the course of American history. A detailed chronological timeline of the war captures the harrowing intensity of 19th-century warfare in firsthand accounts from soldiers, nurses, and frontline journalists. Readers will be enthralled by speech drafts in Abraham Lincoln’s own hand, quotes from…

As photography became an increasingly accessible medium in the twentieth century, the popularity of the photographic album exploded, yielding a wonderful range of objects made for varying purposes—to memorialize, document (officially or unofficially), promote, or educate and sometimes simply to channel creative energy. Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography traces the rise of the album from the turn of last century…

After the Bible, the Passover haggadah is the most widely read classic text in the Jewish tradition. More than four thousand editions have been published since the late fifteenth century, but few are as exquisite as the Washington Haggadah, which resides in the Library of Congress. Now, a stunning facsimile edition meticulously reproduced in full color brings this beautiful illuminated manuscript to a new…

This beautifully illustrated book takes readers on a visual journey from early churchyards and family plots to the establishment of the nation’s first rural cemeteries of the nineteenth century, to the expansive memorial parks and ‘green’ burials of today. With more than 600 archival photographs and plans that shed light on the great diversity of burial structures and traditions, this comprehensive sourcebook introduces readers…

Combining fifty rare, beautiful, and diverse maps of the Prairie State from the collections of the Library of Congress, a foreword about the Library collection and the Illinois maps, informative captions about the origins and contents of those maps, and essays on state history, this book is a collectible for cartography buffs and a celebration of Illinois for residents, former residents, and visitors.

This groundbreaking work gathers poems by forty-three Poets Laureate of the United States. As a record of poetry, The Poets Laureate Anthology charts the course of American poetry over a seventy-five-year period with some of the world’s best-known poems and many new surprises.Elizabeth Hun Schmidt gathered and introduced a selection of poems by each of the forty-three poets who were named to the post…

The image of the untamed American West persists as one of our country’s most enduring cultural myths, and few photographers have captured more compelling images of the frontier than Timothy H. O’Sullivan. Trained under Mathew Brady, O’Sullivan accompanied several government expeditions to the West—most notably with geologist Clarence King in 1867 and cartographer George M. Wheeler in 1871. Along these journeys, O’Sullivan produced many…

Showcasing American music and music making during the Great Depression, Hard Luck Blues presents more than two hundred photographs created by the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration photography program. With an appreciation for the amateur and the local, FSA photographers depicted a range of musicians sharing the regular music of everyday life, from informal songs in migrant work camps, farmers’ homes, barn dances, and…