JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

There are many photographic souvenir publications for New York City, but there are very few that are so interested in including people in their many city landscape images as Illustrated Souvenir of New York (1937). It is attractively bound–or at least it has a more complicated binding than most of these publications–which was something that attracted my attention. In any event, it turns out that there are quite a few unusually-social images for a publication meant to concentrate on tourists’ high points of a visit to NYC, a few of which I’m including below.

One of my favorites from the series is a montage of people in the Manhattan skyline–this seems a little unusual for the period, though I’ve encountered this sort of image before (a few examples of which you can find on this blog by searching people/skyline). The title for the image is a little odd –“blood and steel, ambition, brains and glamour New York”–and has a bit of a train-wreck flavoring, along with a taste of Prussia (as in the “Blut und Eisen”/”Blood and Steel” speech of von Bismarck in 1862):

[Detail]