I was born in the late 1970s and cannot remember a time when the nuclear threat kept me awake at night.   I've been exposed to tornado drills, not air raid drills; calls for nuclear disarmament formed a background hum that was soft and loud by turns.   

While I was digging through some of our Brooklyn Daily Eagle photographs, I found several images that represent Brooklyn life during the Cold War.  They cover a wide range of subjects from atomic air raid drills and civil defense preparedness to exhibits on nuclear physics, at the same time providing a primer on 1950s fashions.

This poster was distributed by the Office of Civil Defense in Brooklyn.  It was 9x14 inches and was suitable to hang in the kitchen or an office as a reminder of what to do in if Brooklyn was attacked by a nuclear weapon. Those of us working in the Library would have been well placed,  as the local bomb shelter was in the Central Library's basement.

Here are children at Public School 125 in Brownsville going back to class after an atomic air raid drill.  These kindergarteners were sheltered in a hallway. 

The regional winners of the Eagle-sponsored Miss Brooklyn pageant participate in the Brooklyn Civil Defense Day recruiting rally. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 8, 1951. 

I would love to know what the other facts are, but the two depicted in this photograph are definitely winners. Held aloft by Miss Brownsville East New York and Miss Bensonhurst: "Fact #12 Women can play as important a role as men, in the civil defense forces." Note the manly clipped fingernails above the perfect manicure holding the shovel. And our favorite presented by Miss Heights-Downtown and Miss Coney Island: "Fact #1 If an atom bomb drops we will not all be killed." Now that is a fact that I am sure is still relevant today. At the edge of the two-mile radius shown, only one little figure is lying flat while all the others--who appear to be wearing trousers, not skirts, by the way--are still standing! I for one am grateful to the publishers of the posters--the New York City Office of Civil Defense and the National Committee of Thirteen Against Superstition, Prejudice and Fear--for those immensely comforting words.

Update - we just had to resize this poster for everyone to see!

 Atomic Age Halloween.  Brooklyn Daily Eagle November 1, 1951.

 Atoms for Peace exhibit, Brooklyn Public Library, 1957

Brooklyn Public Library played a role in promoting the peaceful uses of atomic energy in 1957 through an exhibit and lectures.  "Atoms for Peace" was a traveling exhibit prepared by the United States Atomic Energy Commission.  The exhibit opened with a one-of-a-kind ribbon cutting by City Council President Abe Stark.  He used a set of mechanical hands that were on exhibit to show the public how to handle radioactive materials safely at a distance.  The exhibit focused on industry, medicine, and the "advances" being made in agriculture and the food industry. 

Brooklyn Public Library invites you to look into the atomic future with two outstanding nuclear physicists, April 1957

Dr. Lawrence V. Parsegian spoke on the wonder of the atom followed by the screening of the film "A" Is for Atom.  Three weeks later, Dr. Lyle Borst discussed Atoms for Peace: In the Home, In the Factory, In the Classroom. 

The Library's leading role in both education and defense is evident from these materials, which provide an uncannily immediate sense of what it must have felt like to live in Brooklyn during that time.

Join us in the Brooklyn Collection on Wednesday October 28th for an illustrated talk by the author of  Green Oasis in Brooklyn, featured previously in this blog. There will be a short reception at 6:30 with wine and cheese and possibly some black and orange things if we get inspired -- followed by the talk at 7 p.m. 

On Saturday and Sunday October 10 and 11 at 3 p.m., free guided tours through areas of the Grand Army Plaza library that are not usually accessible to the public will be offered as part of the Open House New York weekend.   Reservations are required for these tours and participants will learn about the history of the Central Library and will visit the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper "morgue". A  pictorial history of the 36-year effort to build the Central Library, prepared by Olivia of the Brooklyn Collection, will be on show in the Grand Lobby. 

Did you know that this is what the building could have looked like?

For more information on the history of the Central Library building you can read this post written by Joy AND you can come to the Central Library -- the one that WAS built:

For more information on Open House New York's programs you can visit http://www.ohny.org/.  To reserve a spot on the tour please write to c.hayes@brooklynpublicilbrary.org.

Wilhelmena Kelly gave an illustrated talk last night to a standing-room only crowd on the history of Crown Heights, in the Brooklyn Collection's Reserve Room. Ms Kelly is an avid genealogist as well as the author of two books on the central Brooklyn communities of Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant.  Formerly  an assistant vice president of communications at Citibank, Wilhelmena is now Regent of the Manhattan Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution and sits on the boards of the African American Genealogy Society, Manhattan Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Association, and the Fort Greene Revolutionary War Committee. She is also a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists who leads a monthly genealogy group every 4th Sunday at BPL's Macon Branch.

Look out for more from Ms Kelly here at the Central Library on February 3 2010, when she will provide a how-to guide to genealogy as an introduction to an ongoing Brooklyn Collection Genealogy Group. Those who are unable to make the trip to the Macon branch at the weekend will, as of next February, be able to pursue their interest here on a midweek evening.  Subsequent meetings in the Central Library will take place on the first Wednesday of the month through June 2010.

A question from one of our longtime patrons got me thinking about bookplates. Brooklyn Public Library has used many bookplates through the course of its 110-year history. Mostly they celebrate the donor of a book, or of the funds that  provided the book, but in the early years of the library bookplates were used simply to announce ownership. As any collector of bookplates will know, wonderful things can happen in the space of that little scrap of paper, usually no more than 3" x 4" and often smaller. 

As it happens, although the mission of the Brooklyn Collection is to collect and make available to the public material on the history of Brooklyn in all media,  we have one collection among our holdings that is completely out of scope--the Bookplate Collection.  Consisting of about 800 bookplates from Europe and America, this collection showcases  the graphic artist's genius writ small.  All kinds of symbolism, heraldry, drawing, printing, etching and typography have been marshalled to claim ownership of books. Libraries, colleges, individuals--the libraries of the mighty and the humble are all represented. The Bookplate Collection was started in 1906 with a gift by Wilbur Macey Stone on behalf of Jay Chambers.

It is a beautiful thing to see how a tiny rectangle can contain a design that encapsulates the spirit and ambition of a book's owner.

As I am unable to do proper justice to that collection here, (but don't despair, I could do a bookplate a week!)  let me concentrate on a few plates produced by Brooklyn Public Library over the years.  The most elaborate of the plates (above) features a torch with the motto Litterae, Lux, Scientiae, surrounded by laurels and curlicues. This design was progressively simplified until few further reductions were possible (see left below). I imagine these design changes were intended to show that the library was moving with the times. Like the pared-down design for the Central Library building, the torch bookplate shed all unnecessary decoration until it was reduced to its most essential and functional elements, beaux arts excess giving way to art deco austerity. Finally the ultimate simplification took place and bookplates disappeared from BPL's incoming books. A complicating factor might have been Queens Borough Public Library's use of a similar torch logo.

There are numerous touching examples throughout the library's collections of bookplates used as memorials.  You see many of them over the course of a career here, but when you actually want to find one in a book, can you? Of course not.

The bookplate that started all this arrived a few days ago with a research request. Our patron had bought a small etching bearing the legend "Gift of the Friends of Brooklyn Public Library" and wanted to know what it was.  We recognized it immediately as a bookplate but knew nothing of its history.  We soon discovered that in 1939 the Friends of Brooklyn Public Library announced a competition for the design of a bookplate. Entries were to be in black and white only, and a prize of $100 was set aside for the winner. Prints submitted were to be exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in November of 1939.

We still do not know for sure, but it seems likely that this plate by New York artist Ernest D. Roth was the winner. The view is a glamorized version of Manhattan seen through the window of the then new Central Library's Trustees Room. The plate could have been produced to celebrate the opening of the new building, which took place after years of delays, in 1941. Roth was born in Germany in 1883 but moved to New York City as a child. The son of a baker, by the 1930s he was living on East 71st Street and enjoying some success as a painter and print maker. 

Perhaps it was to be expected that Manhattanite Roth's design would more or less obliterate Brooklyn. Aside from the magnificent Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument and the owls that guard the Library's Trustees Room, Brooklyn is as compressed as the rest of the world in Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover. But as with so many of the bookplates in our collection, or indeed with any miniature format, one can't help being slightly amazed that so large a vision can be poured into so small a vessel.