92nd Street Y Launches a New Online Archive with 1,000 Recordings of Literary Readings, Musical Performances & More

in Archives, Literature, Poetry | November 26th, 2013

Kurt Von­negut once com­ment­ed, in an inter­view with Joseph Heller, that the best audi­ence he had ever encoun­tered was at the 92nd Street Y in New York. “Those peo­ple know every­thing. They are wide awake and respon­sive.”

Locat­ed at the cor­ner of 92nd Street and Lex­ing­ton Avenue, the 92Y has a ven­er­a­ble his­to­ry of pub­lic per­for­mance, con­ver­sa­tion, poet­ry and beyond. Von­negut him­self appeared at the 92Y sev­en times to read aloud from his own work. (Includ­ing this read­ing from Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons three years before the book was pub­lished.)

Cul­tur­al pro­gram­ming has been a focus at the 92Y since it opened in 1874. Orig­i­nal­ly, it served most­ly Ger­man-Jew­ish men (note, it isn’t a YMCA, but a YM-YWHA—Young Men’s and Women’s Hebrew Asso­ci­a­tion). But the Kauf­mann Con­cert Hall opened in 1930, and that’s where a ver­i­ta­ble Who’s Who of not­ed enter­tain­ment, pol­i­tics, sports, and sci­ence fig­ures have appeared over the years, speak­ing to that “wide awake and respon­sive” audi­ence.

Lucky for the rest of us, the 92Y record­ed the vast major­i­ty of those per­for­mances. And now 1,000 record­ings appear on a new site, 92Y On Demand. It’s a fan­tas­tic archive of audio and video files, search­able by top­ic, year or per­former name.

It’s all there: Yogi Berra look­ing back on his life and career. A 1961 read­ing by a young Nadine Gordimer. Harold Pin­ter read­ing his own short sto­ries and weigh­ing in on the Bea­t­les vs. the Rolling Stones. Andrés Segovia play­ing a clas­si­cal gui­tar recital. Lou Reed speak­ing on the eve of his live per­for­mance of Berlin (top). Bil­ly Crys­tal (below) on roast­ing Muham­mad Ali.

92Y is home to the Unter­berg Poet­ry Cen­ter, so the new archive abounds with poet­ry read­ings. Dylan Thomas read there in 1953. Two years ear­li­er play­wright Thorn­ton Wilder appeared and read from Emi­ly Dickinson’s work. And clos­er to our own time, Paul McCart­ney recent­ly read from his own poet­ry.

See many more cel­e­brat­ed fig­ures such as Maria Bam­ford, Mau­rice Sendak, Dan Sav­age, Junot Díaz and Jamaica Kin­caid read and dis­cuss their work at 92Y On Demand.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Kurt Vonnegut’s Very First Pub­lic Read­ing from Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons (1970)

Lou Reed Rewrites Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” See Read­ings by Reed and Willem Dafoe

Allen Gins­berg Gets Heck­led by Beat Poet Gre­go­ry Cor­so at a 1973 Poet­ry Read­ing

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Fol­low her on Twit­ter.

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Everything You Wanted to Know About the L.A. Aqueduct That Made Roman Polanski’s Chinatown Famous: A New UCLA Archive

in Archives, Film, History | November 13th, 2013

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Next year marks the 40th anniver­sary of a mod­ern clas­sic, Roman Polanski’s Chi­na­town. And sure­ly no oth­er film has even come close to mak­ing the con­struc­tion of an aque­duct so thrilling.

For sure, the siz­able serv­ings of incest, cor­rup­tion, and greed help car­ry Robert Towne’s bril­liant screen­play. But under Towne’s script are the bones of anoth­er sto­ry, the sto­ry of an engi­neer­ing feat that eclipsed the Pana­ma Canal. Yes we’re talk­ing about the build­ing of the great Los Ange­les aque­duct start­ing in 1908.

In the pref­ace to the script Towne wrote this, “the great crimes in Cal­i­for­nia have been com­mit­ted against the land—and against the peo­ple who own it and future gen­er­a­tions. It was only nat­ur­al that the script should evolve into the sto­ry of a man who raped the land and his own daugh­ter.”

Towne didn’t wor­ry about stick­ing to the facts (he set the action of Chi­na­town in the 1930s—an inher­ent­ly more glam­orous peri­od, espe­cial­ly in Los Ange­les). Some even argue that the film cre­ates an entire­ly dif­fer­ent (and wrong) his­to­ry of the project that is remem­bered as fact.

UCLA has cre­at­ed the Los Ange­les Aque­duct Dig­i­tal Plat­form, a col­lec­tion of arti­cles, maps, images and gen­er­al his­to­ry of the project and time that sets the record straight. Among its great­est resources are those about the film that made South­ern Cal­i­for­ni­a’s water issues famous. In fact, there is an abun­dance of infor­ma­tion about the film itself, even if it wasn’t his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate.

There are links to, among oth­er resources, a con­ver­sa­tion with Robert Towne where he dis­cuss­es his inspi­ra­tion for the screen­play.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Fol­low her on Twit­ter.

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Run Vintage Video Games (From Pac-Man to E.T.) and Software in Your Web Browser, Thanks to Archive.org

in Archives, Internet Archive, Software, Technology, Video Games | October 30th, 2013

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Note: If you’re hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties get­ting this soft­ware run­ning in your brows­er give Fire­fox a try. It seems to work the best.

Movies, com­mer­cials, radio shows, even books: we’ve enjoyed the abil­i­ty to effort­less­ly pull up things we remem­ber from our child­hood on the inter­net just long enough that it feels strange and uncom­fort­able when we can’t. Up until now, though, we haven’t had an easy way to re-expe­ri­ence the com­put­er soft­ware we remem­ber using in decades past. In my case, of course — and like­ly in a fair few of yours as well — I spent most of my com­put­er time in decades past play­ing games and not, say, build­ing bal­ance sheets. But whichev­er you did, the Inter­net Archive’s new­ly opened His­tor­i­cal Soft­ware Archive makes it easy to re-live those old days at the key­board with­out hav­ing to buy a vin­tage com­put­er on eBay, track down its soft­ware, remem­ber all its required com­mands and key­strokes, and hope the flop­py discs — or, heav­en help us, cas­sette tapes — boot up cor­rect­ly. They’ve made these wealth of games, appli­ca­tions, and odd­i­ties freely avail­able with the devel­op­ment of JMESS, a Javascript-pow­ered ver­sion of the Mul­ti Emu­la­tor Super Sys­tem, “a mature and breath­tak­ing­ly flex­i­ble com­put­er and con­sole emu­la­tor that has been in devel­op­ment for over a decade and a half by hun­dreds of vol­un­teers.”

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They say a bit more about the tech­nol­o­gy behind all this on the Inter­net Archive Blog, and the His­tor­i­cal Soft­ware Archive’s front page offers rec­om­men­da­tions for which “ground-break­ing and his­tor­i­cal­ly impor­tant soft­ware prod­ucts” to try first, includ­ing 1.) Jor­dan Mech­n­er’s Karate­ka (top), a hot game in 1980 and the most pop­u­lar item in the archive today; 2) Sier­ra On-Line’s Mys­tery House (above), which gave rise more or less by itself to a vast genre of graph­ic adven­tures; 3) three adap­ta­tions of Nam­co’s Pac-Man (one for the Atari 2600, one remade for that same con­sole, one law­suit-induc­ing knock­off for the less­er-known Odyssey2); 4) E.T. the Extra-Ter­res­tri­al, a “1982 adven­ture video game devel­oped and pub­lished by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 2600 video game con­sole;” and 5) Dan Brick­lin and Bob Frankston’s Visi-Calc (below), the grand­dad­dy of all spread­sheet pro­grams, and arguably the sin­gle appli­ca­tion that turned com­put­ing from hob­by into neces­si­ty. Or how about 6) Word­Star, the ear­ly word pro­cess­ing pro­gram? Just click on the “Run an in-brows­er emu­la­tion of the pro­gram” link to fire up any of these and, if you’re under about 30, expe­ri­ence just what com­put­er users of the late sev­en­ties and ear­ly eight­ies had to deal with — and how much fun they had.

Visicalc

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Indie Video Game Mak­ers Are Chang­ing the Game

The Great Gats­by and Wait­ing for Godot: The Video Game Edi­tions

Ancient Greek Pun­ish­ments: The Retro Video Game

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Online Emily Dickinson Archive Makes Thousands of the Poet’s Manuscripts Freely Available

in Archives, Literature, Poetry | October 23rd, 2013

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Per­haps the most famous of all lit­er­ary reclus­es, despite her­self, Emi­ly Dick­in­son left a posthu­mous­ly dis­cov­ered cache of poet­ry that did not receive a prop­er schol­ar­ly treat­ment until the pub­li­ca­tion of The Poems of Emi­ly Dick­in­son by Thomas H. John­son in 1955, which made avail­able Dickinson’s com­plete body of 1,775 poems in their intend­ed state of punc­tu­a­tion and cap­i­tal­iza­tion. For the first time, read­ers out­side the small Dick­in­son fam­i­ly cir­cle could read the work she cir­cu­lat­ed pri­vate­ly in so-called “fas­ci­cles” as well as the hun­dreds of poems no one had seen dur­ing her life­time.  There is some ques­tion over whether Dick­in­son wished to pub­lish for a wider audi­ence. She shared her work only with fam­i­ly and friends, some of whom pub­lished ten of her poems in news­pa­pers between 1850 and 1866, most like­ly with­out her knowl­edge or con­sent. Many urged Dick­in­son to pub­lish. Author Helen Hunt Jack­son wrote to her: “You are a great poet—and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud.” Nev­er­the­less, Dick­in­son “hes­i­tat­ed,” an impor­tant word in her lex­i­con, expres­sive of her pro­found agnos­tic doubts about the val­ue of fame, suc­cess, and immor­tal­i­ty.

Pos­si­bly due to the lack of schol­ar­ly inter­est before Johnson’s col­lec­tion, Dickinson’s trove of man­u­script drafts has remained scat­tered across sev­er­al archives, send­ing researchers hoof­ing it to sev­er­al insti­tu­tions to view the poet’s hand­i­work. As of today, that will no longer be nec­es­sary with the inau­gu­ra­tion of the online Emi­ly Dick­in­son Archive, “an open-access web­site for the man­u­scripts of Emi­ly Dick­in­son” that brings togeth­er thou­sands of man­u­scripts held by Har­vard, Amherst, the Boston Pub­lic Library, the Library of Con­gress, and four oth­er col­lec­tions. Though noth­ing can sub­sti­tute for the almost mys­ti­cal feel­ing of being in the phys­i­cal pres­ence of a favorite author’s arti­facts, the site is an enor­mous boon to schol­ars and lay read­ers alike, since it is open to any­one, unlike most spe­cial col­lec­tions in uni­ver­si­ty libraries (although brows­ing the thou­sands of hand­writ­ten images can be exhaust­ing unless one knows what to look for).

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As The New York Times describes it, the archives’ cre­ation led to some dis­sention among par­tic­i­pat­ing insti­tu­tions. For the past year, Amherst has main­tained an online data­base of their Dick­in­son col­lec­tion (includ­ing the man­u­script of “The way Hope builds his house,” above). Har­vard has been more reluc­tant to make its man­u­scripts avail­able. Nev­er­the­less, the project’s gen­er­al edi­tor, Leslie M. Mor­ris, says that the aim of the archive “was to down­play the issue of own­er­ship and focus on Emi­ly Dick­in­son and her man­u­scripts.” No behind the scenes wran­gling seems to have inter­fered with the website’s ease of use. Read­ers can search the text of man­u­script images or browse images by library col­lec­tion, first line, date, recip­i­ent (of let­ters), or edi­tion. The site also includes a “Lex­i­con,” with def­i­n­i­tions of the poet­’s favorite words from her own dic­tio­nary, Webster’s 1844 Amer­i­can Dic­tio­nary of the Eng­lish Lan­guage, and users can also search for poems by word. All in all it’s an impres­sive project made all the more so by its free avail­abil­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sec­ond Known Pho­to of Emi­ly Dick­in­son Emerges.

Hear Walt Whit­man (Maybe) Read­ing the First Four Lines of His Poem, “Amer­i­ca” (1890)

Penn Sound: Fan­tas­tic Audio Archive of Mod­ern & Con­tem­po­rary Poets

The James Mer­rill Dig­i­tal Archive Lets You Explore the Cre­ative Life of a Great Amer­i­can Poet

Bill Mur­ray Reads Poet­ry at a Con­struc­tion Site

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Alan Lomax’s Music Archive Houses Over 17,400 Folk Recordings From 1946 to the 1990s

in Archives, Education, History, Music | October 1st, 2013

The work of folk­lorists and musi­col­o­gists like Alan Lomax, Stet­son Kennedy, and Har­ry Smith has long been revered in coun­ter­cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ties and libraries; and it occa­sion­al­ly reach­es main­stream audi­ences in, for exam­ple, the Coen Brother’s 2000 film Oh Broth­er, Where Art Thou? and its atten­dant sound­track, or the playlists of purists on col­lege radio and NPR. But their record­ings are much more than his­tor­i­cal nov­el­ties.

Archives like Lomax’s Asso­ci­a­tion for Cul­tur­al Equi­ty—which we’ve fea­tured before—help remind us of our ori­gins as much as bot­tom-up accounts like Howard Zinn’s A People’s His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States. Lomax and his col­leagues believed that folk art and music infuse and renew “high” art and pro­vide bul­warks against the cyn­i­cal des­ti­tu­tion of mass-mar­ket com­mer­cial media that can seem so dead­en­ing and inescapable.

That is not to say that notions of authen­tic­i­ty aren’t fraught with their own prob­lems of exploita­tion. Approach­ing folk art as tourists, we can demean it and our­selves. But the prob­lem is less, I think, one of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion than of neglect: it’s sim­ply far too easy to lose touch, a much-remarked-upon irony of the age of social net­work­ing. Lomax under­stood this. He found­ed ACE “to explore and pre­serve the world’s expres­sive tra­di­tions with human­is­tic com­mit­ment and sci­en­tif­ic engage­ment.” The orga­ni­za­tion resides at NYC’s Hunter Col­lege and, since Lomax’s retire­ment in 1996, has been over­seen by his daugh­ter, Anna Lomax Wood. Through an arrange­ment with the Library of Con­gress, which hous­es the orig­i­nals, ACE has access to all of Lomax’s col­lec­tion of field record­ings and can dis­sem­i­nate them online to the pub­lic. Lomax’s asso­ci­a­tion has also long been active in repa­tri­at­ing record­ed arti­facts to libraries and archives in their places of ori­gin, giv­ing local com­mu­ni­ties access to cul­tur­al his­to­ries that may oth­er­wise be lost to them.

Lomax under­scored the sig­nif­i­cance of his organization’s name in a 1972 essay enti­tled “An Appeal for Cul­tur­al Equi­ty,” in which he lays out the impor­tance of pre­serv­ing cul­tur­al diver­si­ty against the “oppres­sive dull­ness and psy­chic dis­tress” imposed upon “those areas where cen­tral­ized music indus­tries, exploit­ing the star sys­tem and con­trol­ling the com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem, put the local musi­cian out of work and silence folk song.” Are we any more improved forty years lat­er for the shock­ing monop­o­liza­tion of mass media in the hands of a few con­glom­er­ates? I’d answer unequiv­o­cal­ly no but for one impor­tant qual­i­fi­ca­tion: mass media in the form of open online archives allows us unprece­dent­ed access to, for exam­ple, the awe­some late-sev­en­ties film of R.L. Burn­side (top), who like many Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta blues­men before him, would only achieve recog­ni­tion much lat­er in life. Or we can see native North Car­olin­ian Cas Wallin (above) sing a ver­sion of folk song “Pret­ty Saro” in 1982, a song Bob Dylan record­ed and only recent­ly released. Then there’s one of my favorites, “Make Me A Pal­let On Your Floor,” picked and sung below by Mis­sis­sip­pi­an Sam Chatmon—a song played and record­ed by count­less black and white blues and coun­try artists like Mis­sis­sip­pi John Hurt and Gillian Welch.

These and thou­sands of oth­er exam­ples from the ACE archive bring musi­col­o­gists, his­to­ri­ans, folk­lorists, activists, edu­ca­tors, and every­one else clos­er to Lomax’s ideal—that we “learn how we can put our mag­nif­i­cent mass com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy at the ser­vice of each and every branch of the human fam­i­ly.” The ACE cat­a­log con­tains over 17,400 dig­i­tal files, begin­ning with Lomax’s first tape record­ings in 1946, to his dig­i­tal work in the 90s. The archive includes songs, sto­ries, jokes, ser­mons, inter­views and oth­er audio arti­facts from the Amer­i­can South, Appalachia, the Caribbean, and many more locales. The archive fea­tures record­ings from famous names like Woody Guthrie and Lead Bel­ly but pri­mar­i­ly con­sists of folk music from anony­mous folk, rep­re­sent­ing a vari­ety of lan­guages and eth­nic­i­ties. And the archive is ever-expand­ing as it con­tin­ues to dig­i­tize rare record­ings, and to upload vin­tage film, like the videos above, to its YouTube chan­nel.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leg­endary Folk­lorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’

Woody Guthrie at 100: Cel­e­brate His Amaz­ing Life with a BBC Film

Hear Zora Neale Hurston Sing the Bawdy Prison Blues Song “Uncle Bud” (1940)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The James Merrill Digital Archive Lets You Explore the Creative Life of a Great American Poet

in Archives, Poetry | September 30th, 2013

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The Oui­ja-inspired poet­ry of Pulitzer Prize-win­ning poet James Mer­rill (1926–1995) comes alive in a new­ly launched dig­i­tal archive from Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St. Louis. Vis­i­tors to the site can explore note­book after note­book bear­ing Merrill’s hand­writ­ten notes in all caps—col­or­ful tran­scripts from his “Thou­sand and One Evenings Spent/ With [part­ner] David Jack­son at the Oui­ja Board/ In Touch with Ephraim Our Famil­iar Spir­it.” Mer­rill, the son of Charles E. Mer­rill, cofounder of the Mer­rill Lynch invest­ment firm, was con­sid­ered one of the most sig­nif­i­cant Amer­i­can poets of his gen­er­a­tion.

The occult was cen­tral to all of Merrill’s lat­er work, includ­ing “The Book of Ephraim,” which is the cur­rent focus of the James Mer­rill Dig­i­tal Archive. Merrill’s com­plex and high­ly unusu­al cre­ative process is evi­dent in the mate­ri­als pre­sent­ed, all of them drawn from the exten­sive James Mer­rill Papers housed in the university’s Spe­cial Col­lec­tions.

In a descrip­tion on the site, project col­lab­o­ra­tor and grad­u­ate stu­dent Annelise Duer­den (pic­tured at cen­ter below) points out that “the open­ing to ‘The Book of Ephraim’ clam­ors for a medi­um ‘that would reach / The widest pub­lic in the short­est time,’ and we hope that dig­i­tal archiv­ing can pro­vide such an entrance to Merrill’s work, and to the rich­ness of the process behind his fin­ished poem.”

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Duer­den, her­self an active poet, says she was impressed by Merrill’s “imag­i­na­tive force” and “relent­less ener­gy for revi­sion” while help­ing build the archive this past sum­mer along with staff from Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Libraries and the Human­i­ties Dig­i­tal Work­shop.

“Mer­rill orig­i­nal­ly imag­ined con­struct­ing his sto­ry of Ephraim in the form of a nov­el,” she says. “He planned to write it for some time, began work on it, then lost the pages in a taxi, and gave up on the idea of the nov­el of Ephraim, instead writ­ing it in poet­ic form. In a Oui­ja ses­sion, Ephraim lat­er claimed cred­it for los­ing the nov­el.”

“The Book of Ephraim” was first pub­lished in Merrill’s book Divine Come­dies in 1976 and lat­er as the first install­ment of his apoc­a­lyp­tic epic The Chang­ing Light at San­dover, one of the longest poems in any lan­guage and fea­tur­ing voic­es rang­ing from the then-recent­ly deceased poet W. H. Auden to the Archangel Michael.

Evie Hemphill (@evhemphill) is a writer and pho­tog­ra­ph­er for Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Libraries in St. Louis.

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The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy Online: New Archive Will Present 90 Volumes for Free (in Russian)

in Archives, Literature | September 11th, 2013

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This is sure­ly worth a quick heads up: Leo Tolstoy’s entire body of work – all 46,000 pages of it – will appear on the Tolstoy.ru web site. Accord­ing to Tol­stoy’s great-great-grand­daugh­ter Fyok­la Tol­staya, all of the author’s nov­els, short sto­ries, fairy tales, essays and per­son­al let­ters will be made freely avail­able in PDF, FB2 and EPUB for­mats (which you can eas­i­ly load onto a Kin­dle, iPad or almost any oth­er ebook read­er). She goes on to tell the Russ­ian news­pa­per RIA Novosti that the “90-vol­ume edi­tion was scanned and proof­read three times by more than 3,000 vol­un­teers from 49 coun­tries.” Tru­ly an incred­i­ble crowd­sourc­ing feat.

What’s the rub? You have to read Russ­ian. Yes, it’s poten­tial­ly a down­er. But you can always find Tol­stoy’s major works in trans­la­tion in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions.

And if that does­n’t make you feel bet­ter, see the excel­lent bonus mate­r­i­al below.

via The Paris Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Record­ing: Leo Tol­stoy Reads From His Last Major Work in Four Lan­guages, 1909

The Last Days of Leo Tol­stoy Cap­tured on Video

How Leo Tol­stoy Learned to Ride a Bike at 67, and Oth­er Tales of Life­long Learn­ing

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New Archive Makes Available 800,000 Pages Documenting the History of Film, Television & Radio

in Archives, Film, History, Internet Archive, Media, Radio, Television | August 27th, 2013

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Click images for larg­er ver­sions

Film buffs and schol­ars have a new cache at their fin­ger­tips. The Media His­to­ry Dig­i­tal Library has made hun­dreds of thou­sands of pages of film and broad­cast­ing his­to­ry avail­able in a search­able dig­i­tal archive they’ve called Lantern, an open access, inter­ac­tive library.

With help from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son Depart­ment of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Arts, MHDL made their entire col­lec­tion of Busi­ness Screen, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, Pho­to­play and Vari­ety—among oth­er magazines—available for text search­es for the first time.

In 2011 a group of film schol­ars devel­oped MHDL, an updat­ed resource for his­to­ri­ans used to read­ing through micro­film archives of cin­e­ma and broad­cast jour­nals. At the time, their archive was a gold­mine, pulling togeth­er the boun­ty of print­ed mate­r­i­al chron­i­cling the film indus­try. Now they’ve made it bet­ter, with more refined search, fil­ter­ing and sort­ing tools. Plus you can down­load images and texts.

It may have been a rite of pas­sage for film stu­dents to sequester them­selves in a dark library car­rel and scroll through micro­fiche reels of Mov­ing Pic­ture World, an influ­en­tial trade jour­nal until 1927, but Lantern brings ven­er­a­ble movie mag­a­zines dat­ing up to the ear­ly ’70s into the light of day where any­one can access the images and arti­cles of major trade and fan mag­a­zines, free of charge.

An ear­ly on-set chat rag, Film Fun, a mag­a­zine about “the hap­py side of the movies,” brought read­ers “inti­mate gos­sip of the pro­fes­sion told by the actors and actress­es ‘between the reels.’” The images are gor­geous.

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In the twen­ties a new ama­teur movie mak­ing indus­try thrived, with equip­ment and even tour pack­ages avail­able for buffs who want­ed to tour exot­ic locales like Cuba with cam­eras and learn to shoot and pre­serve 16 mm motion pic­tures. A boom in DIY film mag­a­zines like Ama­teur Movie Mak­ers tar­get­ed the ear­ly adopters.

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And lest we think that pulp celebri­ty mags like Peo­ple and Us are low­er brow than those of yes­ter­year, we should think again. I’m not sure about you, but I’m not sure four-times-mar­ried Bette Davis makes the best love advice colum­nist. But appar­ent­ly Pho­to­play mag­a­zine did.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Three Great Films Star­ring Char­lie Chap­lin, the True Icon of Silent Com­e­dy

How Brew­ster Kahle and the Inter­net Archive Will Pre­serve the Infi­nite Infor­ma­tion on the Web

Kate Rix writes about edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media. Vis­it her web­site and fol­low her on Twit­ter.

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