Archives for library history

Remembering Jesse Murry

Jesse Murry was a Black, gay art critic, curator and painter. He was born in 1948 in North Carolina and later moved to nearby Greenburgh to live with an aunt. As a youth he spent a lot of time reading at the White Plains Public Library and became friends with the director, Isabel Duncan Clark, who ended up becoming his legal guardian. He studied at Sarah Lawrence College and lived in a White Plains apartment in the 1970s before moving to New York City in 1979. In the last 14 years of his life he wrote for Arts Magazine, taught
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Categories: Authors & Books, Featured, Homepage, Library News, and Local History.

Local History: Library Hand

An offhand comment to a colleague about his handwriting lead us to this blog post about “library hand,” the formalized style of penmanship librarians were taught to use from the late 19th century until typewriters made the skill obsolete. Before typewriters and automated cataloging systems, librarians maintained handwritten accession books that listed purchasing and bibliographic information for books acquired by the library. Below are various examples of documents from the White Plains Collection that contain “library hand” and some that obviously do not. Even where writers used the style they were likely taught in library science school, there are variations
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Categories: Local History.

People & Stories Oral History Project: Lee Palmer

Lee Palmer and the White Plains Public Library are inseparable.  Lee has worked at the library in one way or another since 1966.  After Lee took a class on storytelling at the library in the mid-1960s, a librarian hired her to be a children's storyteller.  In this oral history, you can hear her enthusiasm for that job and the library's central place in White Plains.  Lee also discusses her reasons for moving to White Plains, her reasons for staying, and the fulfillment she gets from her current work as a Friend of the Library.
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Categories: Local History and Oral History.