Current Exhibition

A Belief in Books: The 270th Anniversary Exhibition

On view in the Peluso Family Exhibition Gallery until December 31, 2024.

Travel back to 1754, the year the Library was founded by six prominent New Yorkers, all Enlightenment men. Committed to personal freedom and religious tolerance, they believed that a subscription library, open to all, would inevitably lead to a better society. But Enlightenment ideals about individual rights extended only to white men like themselves. 

Discover how every aspect of New York's economy and wealth relied on the slave trade, including the fortunes of our founders. At the time, one in five New Yorkers were enslaved, brought against their will on the same ships that carried books to the new Library.

Books and facsimiles on display illustrate the wide variety of genres and titles read by Library members from 1754 until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Selections are presented in three rotations throughout the run of the exhibition.

A Belief in Books Panel 3 Images
  1. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. Slave ship. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1760-1800.
  2. Slave-market on the New York City waterfront, 1600s. Hand-colored woodcut. North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy Stock Photo.
  3. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. Captain Thomas Doring [also written "Doran"]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1769.
  4. A Plan of the City and Environs of New York as they were in the years 1742-1743 & 1744; Presented to the New-York Historical Society by David Grim.; 1813; black and color ink, black and color pencil, and black and color wash on paper; 57 x 57 cm. New-York Historical Society, 3046.
  5. Runaway ad for an unnamed African man placed by Philip Livingston in the New-York Gazette, New York, NY, November 6, 1752. New Jersey Slavery Records, Scarlet and Black Center, Rutgers University. NJS-SRC-00592.
  6. Graham Russell Hodges and Alan Edward Brown, eds., "Pretends to be Free": Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary. New York and New Jersey (New York: Garland, 1994).