50+ Free Charlie Chaplin Films Online

in Comedy, Film | July 14th, 2025

A few things to know about Char­lie Chap­lin. He starred in over 80 films, reel­ing off most dur­ing the silent film era. In 1914 alone, he act­ed in 40 films, then anoth­er 15 in 1915. By the 1920s, Chap­lin had emerged as the first larg­er-than-life movie star and direc­tor, if not the most rec­og­niz­able per­son in the world. Thanks to YouTube, you can watch 50+ Chap­lin films on the web. Above, you will find a Chap­lin mini-film fes­ti­val that brings togeth­er four movies shot in 1917: The Adven­tur­er, The Cure, Easy Street and The Immi­grant. And then below you’ll find 50+ oth­er films arranged in a neat list. Many can be oth­er­wise found in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

• A Bur­lesque On Car­men — Free — Orig­i­nal two-reel par­o­dy of Bizet’s Car­men by Char­lie Chap­lin. Also stars Leo White & Edna Pur­viance. (1915)
• A Busy Day — Free — Chap­lin plays a wife jeal­ous of her hus­band’s inter­est in anoth­er woman, played by Phyl­lis Allen. On her way to attack the cou­ple, the wife inter­rupts the set of a film, knock­ing over a film direc­tor, played by Mack Sen­nett, and a police­man, played by Bil­ly Gilbert. (1914)

• A Day’s Plea­sure — Free — “Chap­lin’s fourth film for First Nation­al Films. It was cre­at­ed at the Chap­lin Stu­dio. It was a quick­ly made two-reel­er to help fill a gap while work­ing on his first fea­ture The Kid. It is about a day out­ing with his wife and the kids and things don’t go smooth­ly.” (1919)

• A Dog’s Life — Free – This endear­ing short Chap­lin film tells the sto­ry of under­dogs, human and canine, suc­ceed­ing despite the odds. (1918)
• A Fair Exchange — Free — Orig­i­nal­ly released as Get­ting Acquaint­ed, the film’s plot has been sum­ma­rized as fol­lows: “Char­lie and his wife are walk­ing in the park when they encounter Ambrose and his wife. The part­ners become fond of their coun­ter­parts and begin chas­ing each oth­er around. A police­man look­ing for a pro­fes­sion­al Don Juan becomes involved, as does a Turk.” (1914)
• A Film John­nie - Free — Char­lie goes to the movie and falls in love with a girl on the screen. (1914)
• A Night in the Show — Free — Chap­lin played two roles: one as Mr. Pest and one as Mr. Row­dy. The film was cre­at­ed from Chap­lin’s stage work from a play called Mum­ming Birds. (1915)
• A Night Out — Free — “After a vis­it to a pub, Char­lie and Ben cause a ruckus at a posh restau­rant. Char­lie lat­er finds him­self in a com­pro­mis­ing posi­tion at a hotel with the head wait­er’s wife.” (1915)
• A Woman — Free — This Chap­lin film starts with Char­lie meet­ing Edna (Edna Pur­viance) and her par­ents in a park; the moth­er is played by Mar­ta Gold­en and the father by Charles Ins­ley. (1915)
• Behind the Screen – Free – A short film writ­ten and direct­ed by Chap­lin, the film is long on slap­stick, but it also gets into themes deal­ing with gen­der bend­ing and homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. (1916)

• Between Show­ers - Free — A short Key­stone film from 1914 star­ring Char­lie Chap­lin, Ford Ster­ling, and Emma Bell Clifton.
• By the Sea — Free — “It is windy at a bathing resort. After fight­ing with one of the two hus­bands, Char­lie approach­es Edna while the two hus­bands them­selves fight over ice cream. Dri­ven away by her hus­band, Char­lie turns to the oth­er’s wife.” (1915)
• Caught in a Cabaret — Free —  Char­lie is a clum­sy wait­er in a cheap cabaret, suf­fer­ing the strict orders from his boss. He’ll meet a pret­ty girl in the park, pre­tend­ing to be a fan­cy ambas­sador, despite the jeal­ousy of her fiancée. (1914)
• Char­lie Shang­haied — Free — Char­lie Chap­lin and his Tramp char­ac­ter gets shang­haied by crooks. (1915)
• Char­lie’s Recre­ation — Free — Out of cos­tume, Char­lie is a clean-shaven dandy who, some­what drunk, vis­its a dance hall. There the wardrobe girl has three rival admir­ers: the band leader, one of the musi­cians, and now Char­lie. (1914).
• Char­lotte et Le Man­nequin — Free — Also known as Mabel’s Mar­ried Life, the film’s plot is sum­ma­rized as fol­lows: “Accost­ed by a mash­er in the park and unable to moti­vate hus­band Char­lie into tak­ing action, Mabel gets him a box­ing man­nequin to sharp­en his fight­ing skills.” (1914)
• Cru­el Cru­el Love - Free — Chap­lin plays a rich, upper-class gen­tle­man whose romance is endan­gered when his girl­friend over­sees him being embraced by a maid. (1914)
• Face on a Bar­room Floor — Free — “The plot is a satire derived from Hugh Antoine D’Ar­cy’s poem of the same title. The painter courts Madeleine but los­es to the wealthy client who sits for his por­trait. The despair­ing artist draws the girl’s por­trait on the bar­room floor and gets tossed out. Years lat­er he sees her, her hus­band and their horde of chil­dren. Unrec­og­nized by her, Char­lie shakes off his trou­bles and walks off into the future.” (1914)
• Gen­tle­men of Nerve — Free — “Mabel and her beau go to an auto race and are joined by Char­lie and his friend. As Char­lie’s friend is attempt­ing to enter the race­way through a hole, the friend gets stuck and a police­man shows up. Char­lie sprays the police­man with soda until [his] friends makes it through the hole. In the grand­stand, Mabel aban­dons her beau for Char­lie. Both Char­lie’s friend and Mabel’s are arrest­ed and hauled away.” (1914)
• His Favorite Pas­time — Free — Char­lie gets drunk in the bar. He steps out­side, meets a pret­ty woman, tries to flirt with her, only to retreat after the wom­an’s father returns. (1914)
• His New Job — Free — “Char­lie is try­ing to get a job in a movie. After caus­ing dif­fi­cul­ty on the set he is told to help the car­pen­ter. When one of the actors does­n’t show, Char­lie is giv­en a chance to act but instead enters a dice game. When he does final­ly act he ruins the scene, wrecks the set and tears the skirt from the star.” (1915)
• His Pre­his­toric Past — Free — “Char­lie dreams he is in the stone age. There King Low-Brow rules a harem of wives. Char­lie, in skins and a bowler, falls in love with the king’s favorite wife, Sum-Babee. Dur­ing a hunt­ing trip the king is pushed over a cliff. Char­lie pro­claims him­self king, but Ku-Ku dis­cov­ers the real king alive. They return to find Char­lie and Sum- Babee togeth­er.” (1914)
• His Tryst­ing Place — Free — “Char­lie’s wife sends him to the store for a baby bot­tle with milk. Else­where, Ambrose offers to post a love let­ter for a woman in his board­ing house. The two men meet at a restau­rant and each takes the oth­er’s coat by mis­take. Char­lie’s wife thinks he has a lover; Ambrose’s believes he has an ille­git­i­mate child.” (1914)
• In the Park — Free — “A tramp steals a girl’s hand­bag, but when he tries to pick Char­lie’s pock­et los­es his cig­a­rettes and match­es. He res­cues a hot dog man from a thug, but takes a few with his walk­ing stick. When the thief tries to take some of Char­lie’s sausages, Char­lie gets the hand­bag. The hand­bag makes its way from per­son to per­son to its own­er, who is angry with her boyfriend who did­n’t pro­tect her in the first place. The boyfriend decides to throw him­self in the lake in despair, so Char­lie helps him out.” (1915)
• Kid Auto Races at Venice – Free – It’s the first film in which Char­lie Chap­lin’s icon­ic “Lit­tle Tramp” char­ac­ter makes his appear­ance. (1914)
• Laugh­ing Gas - Free — Film star­ring Chap­lin is some­times known as “Busy Lit­tle Den­tist”, “Down and Out”, “Laffing Gas”, “The Den­tist”, and “Tun­ing His Ivories”.
• Mabel’s Busy Day — Free — “A hot­dog girl gives one to a police­man who then allows her into a race track. While oth­er cus­tomers swipe her hot­dogs, Char­lie runs off with the whole box, pre­tend­ing to sell them while actu­al­ly giv­ing them away. She calls her police­man who bat­tles Char­lie.” (1914)
• Mabel’s Strange Predica­ment — Free — Watch lots and lots of high jinks go down in a hotel. (1914)
• Mak­ing a Liv­ing — Free – Pre­mier­ing on Feb­ru­ary 2, 1914, Mak­ing a Liv­ing marks the first film appear­ance by Char­lie Chap­lin.
• Musi­cal Tramps — Free — “Char­lie and his part­ner are to deliv­er a piano to 666 Prospect St. and repos­sess one from 999 Prospect St. They con­fuse the address­es. The dif­fi­cul­ties of deliv­er­ing the piano by mule cart, and most of the spe­cif­ic gags, appeared lat­er in Lau­rel and Hardy’s ‘The Music Box’.” (1914)
• One A.M. — Free — The first silent film Char­lie Chap­lin starred in alone. (1916)
• Police — Free — “Police was Char­lie Chap­lin’s 14th released film from Essanay. It was made at the Majes­tic Stu­dio in Los Ange­les. Char­lie play­ing an ex-con­vict finds life on the out­side not to his lik­ing and leads him to break­ing into a home with anoth­er thief (Wes­ley Rug­gles). Edna Pur­viance plays the girl liv­ing in the home who tries to change him.” (1916)
• Shoul­der Arms — Free — Char­lie is a boot camp pri­vate who has a dream of being a hero who goes on a dar­ing mis­sion behind ene­my lines. (1918)
• Sun­ny­side — Free — “Char­lie works on a farm from 4am to late at night. He gets his food on the run (milk­ing a cow into his cof­fee, hold­ing an chick­en over the fry­ing pan to get fried eggs). He loves the neigh­bor’s daugh­ter Edna but is dis­liked by her father. He rides a cow into a stream and is kicked off. Uncon­scious, he dreams of a nymph dance. Back in real­i­ty a city slick­er is hurt in a car crash and is being cared for by Edna. When Char­lie is reject­ed after attempt­ing to imi­tate the slick­er, the result is ambiguous–either trag­ic or a hap­py end­ing. Crit­ics have long argued as to whether the final scene is real or a dream.” (1919)
• The Bank — Free — “Char­lie does every­thing but an effi­cient job as jan­i­tor. Edna buys her fiance, the cashier, a birth­day present. Char­lie thinks “To Charles with Love” is for him. He presents her a rose which she throws in the garbage. Depressed, Char­lie dreams of a bank rob­bery and his hero­ic role in sav­ing the man­ag­er and Edna … but it is only a dream.”
• The Bond — Free — A pro­pa­gan­da film cre­at­ed and fund­ed by Chap­lin for the­atri­cal release to help sell U.S. Lib­er­ty Bonds dur­ing World War I. (1918)
• The Cham­pi­on — Free — “Walk­ing along with his bull­dog, Char­lie finds a “good luck” horse­shoe just as he pass­es a train­ing camp adver­tis­ing for a box­ing part­ner “who can take a beat­ing.” After watch­ing oth­ers lose, Char­lie puts the horse­shoe in his glove and wins. The train­er pre­pares Char­lie to fight the world cham­pi­on. A gam­bler wants Char­lie to throw the fight. He and the train­er’s daugh­ter fall in love.” (1915)
• The Count — Free — The Count was Char­lie Chap­lin’s 5th film for Mutu­al Films. Co-star­ring Eric Camp­bell and Edna Pur­viance, it is a sto­ry about Char­lie and his boss find­ing an invi­ta­tion to a par­ty from a real Count. (1916)
• The Fatal Mal­let — Free — Three men will fight for the love of a charm­ing girl. Char­lie will play dirty, throw­ing bricks to his con­tender, and using a huge ham­mer to hurt one of them. But a pre­co­cious kid will be the fourth suit­or in dis­cord. (1914)
• The Fire­man — Free — Char­lie Chaplin’s sec­ond short for Mutu­al con­tin­ued his focus on gags and situations—as the title sug­gests, Chap­lin plays the role of an inept fire­fight­er. (1916)
• The Floor­walk­er — Free — “The Floor­walk­er was Char­lie Chap­lin’s first Mutu­al Film Com­pa­ny made in 1916. It starred Chap­lin as a cus­tomer in a depart­ment store who finds out the man­ag­er is steal­ing mon­ey from the store. It was not­ed for the first ‘run­ning stair­case’ used in films.” (1916)
• The Good for Noth­ing — Free — Made at the Key­stone Stu­dios, the film involves Chap­lin tak­ing care of a man in a wheel­chair. (1914)
• The Immi­grant — Free — Chap­lin, in the role of the Tramp char­ac­ter, plays an immi­grant com­ing to the Unit­ed States. He gets accused of theft while on a voy­age across the Atlantic Ocean. (1917)
• The Kid - Free — The Kid is a 1921 Amer­i­can silent com­e­dy-dra­ma film writ­ten, pro­duced, direct­ed and star­ring Char­lie Chap­lin, and fea­tures Jack­ie Coogan as his foundling baby, adopt­ed son and side­kick. This was Chap­lin’s first full-length film as a direc­tor. (1921)
• The Knock­out — Free —  Char­lie Chap­lin’s sev­en­teenth film for Key­stone Stu­dios. Chap­lin only has a small role, and Fat­ty Arbuck­le takes up the main role. (1914)
• The Land­la­dy’s Pet — Free — Oth­er­wise known as The Star Board­er, the film turns around this theme: A brat’s mag­ic lantern show expos­es an indis­creet moment between a land­la­dy and her star board­er. (1914)
• The Mas­quer­ad­er — Free — “Char­lie is an actor in a film stu­dio. He mess­es up sev­er­al scenes and is tossed out. Return­ing dressed as a lady, he charms the direc­tor. Even so, Char­lie nev­er makes it into film, wind­ing up at the bot­tom of a well.” (1914)
• The New Jan­i­tor — Free — “Char­lie is jan­i­tor for a firm the man­ag­er of which receives a threat­en­ing note about his gam­bling debts. He throws a buck­et of water out the win­dow which lands on his boss and costs him his job. The boss, attempt­ing to steal the mon­ey heeds from the office safe, is caught by his sec­re­tary and Char­lie comes to save her and the mon­ey. He is briefly accused of being the thief but ulti­mate­ly tri­umphs.” (1914)
• The Pawn­shop – Free – Rich in slap­stick, The Pawn­shop was one of Chap­lin’s more pop­u­lar movies for Mutu­al Film, the pro­duc­er of many fine Chap­lin come­dies. (1916)
• The Prop­er­ty Man — Free — “Char­lie has trou­ble with actors’ lug­gage and con­flicts over who gets the star’s dress­ing room. There are fur­ther dif­fi­cul­ties with fre­quent scene changes, wrong entries and a fire­man’s hose. At one point he jug­gles an ath­lete’s sup­posed weights. The humor is still rough: he kicks an old­er assis­tant in the face and allows him to be run over by a truck.” (1914)
• The Rink – Free – The Rink, Chap­lin’s 8th film for Mutu­al Films, show­cas­es the actor’s roller skat­ing abil­i­ties. (1916)
• The Rival Mash­ers — Free — “Char­lie and a rival vie for the favors of their land­la­dy. In the park they each fall dif­fer­ent girls, though Char­lie’s has a male friend already. Char­lie con­sid­ers sui­cide, is talked out of it by a police­man, and lat­er throws his girl’s friend into the lake. Fright­ened, the girls go off to a movie. Char­lie shows up there and flirts with them. Lat­er both rivals sub­sti­tute them­selves for the girls and attack the unwit­ting Char­lie. In an audi­ence-wide fight, Char­lie is tossed from the screen.” (1914)
• The Rounders — Free — Writes IMDB: “Two drunks live in the same hotel. One beats his wife, the oth­er is beat­en by his. They go off and get drunk togeth­er. They try to sleep in a restau­rant using tables as beds and are thrown out. They lie down in a row boat which fills with water, drown­ing them (a fate appar­ent­ly bet­ter than going home to their wives).” (1914)
• The Tramp - Free — The film made Chap­lin’s great Tramp char­ac­ter famous. (1915)
• The Vagabond — Free — A silent film by Char­lie Chap­lin that co-starred Edna Pur­viance, Eric Camp­bell, Leo White and Lloyd Bacon, with Chap­lin appear­ing as The Tramp. The British Film Insti­tute calls it the “piv­otal work” of his Mutu­al peri­od – “and his most touch­ing.” (1916)
• Tillie’s Punc­tured Romance – Free – Among oth­er things, the film is notable for being the last film that Chap­lin did­n’t write or direct by him­self. (1914)
• Triple Trou­ble — Free — “As Colonel Nutt is exper­i­ment­ing with explo­sives, a new jan­i­tor is join­ing his house­hold. The inept jan­i­tor pro­ceeds to make life dif­fi­cult for the rest of the staff. Mean­while, a for­eign agent arrives at the house in hopes of get­ting Col. Nut­t’s lat­est inven­tion. The inven­tor throws him out, so the agent then employs a thug to get the for­mu­la. When police head to the Nutt home to start an inves­ti­ga­tion, a com­pli­cat­ed fra­cas ensues.” (1918)
• Twen­ty Min­utes of Love — Free — IMDB sum­ma­rizes thus­ly: “Char­lie is hang­ing around in the park, find­ing prob­lems with a jeal­ous suit­or, a man who thinks that Char­lie has robbed him of a watch, a police­man and even a lit­tle boy, all because our friend can’t stop snoop­ing.” (1914)
• Work — Free — “Char­lie and his boss have dif­fi­cul­ties just get­ting to the house they are going to wall­pa­per. The house­hold­er is angry because he can’t get break­fast and his wife is scream­ing at the maid as they arrive. The kitchen gas stove explodes, and Char­lie offers to fix it. The wife’s secret lover arrives and is passed off as the work­ers’ super­vi­sor, but the hus­band does­n’t buy this and fires shots. The stove explodes vio­lent­ly, destroy­ing the house.” (1915)

Most of the quot­ed sum­maries above were writ­ten by Ed Stephan on IMDB.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2011. Some of the links and text have been updat­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

When Char­lie Chap­lin Entered a Chap­lin Look-Alike Con­test & Came in 20th Place

What Would the World of Char­lie Chap­lin Look Like in Col­or?: Watch a Col­or­ful­ly Restored Ver­sion of A Night at the Show (1915)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

Char­lie Chap­lin Gets Strapped into a Dystopi­an “Rube Gold­berg Machine,” a Fright­ful Com­men­tary on Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism

Char­lie Chap­lin Films a Scene Inside a Lion’s Cage in 200 Takes

The World’s Oldest Cookbook: Discover 4,000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Babylon

in Food & Drink, History | July 11th, 2025

If asked about your favorite dish, you’d do well to name some­thing exot­ic. Gone are the days when a taste for the likes of Ital­ian, Mex­i­can, or Chi­nese cui­sine could qual­i­fy you as an adven­tur­ous eater. Even expe­di­tions to the very edges of the menus at Peru­vian, Ethiopi­an, or Laot­ian restau­rants, say, would be unlike­ly to draw much respect from seri­ous twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry eaters. One solu­tion is to take your culi­nary voy­ages through not just space but also time, seek­ing out the meals of cen­turies and even mil­len­nia past. This has late­ly become some­what eas­i­er to do, thanks to the work of Har­vard- and Yale-asso­ci­at­ed researchers like Gojko Bar­jamovic, Patri­cia Jura­do Gon­za­lez, Chelsea A. Gra­ham, Agnete W. Lassen, Naw­al Nas­ral­lah, and Pia M. Sörensen.

A few years ago, that inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research team par­tic­i­pat­ed in a Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly round­table on mak­ing and eat­ing the ancient Mesopotami­an recipes con­tained on what are known as the “Yale Culi­nary Tablets.” Dat­ing from between 1730 BC and the sixth or sev­enth cen­tu­ry BC, their Cuneiform inscrip­tions offer only broad and frag­men­tary guid­ance on the prepa­ra­tion of once-com­mon dish­es, none of which, luck­i­ly, are par­tic­u­lar­ly com­plex.

The veg­e­tar­i­an soup pašrū­tum, or “unwind­ing,” involves fla­vors no bold­er than those of cilantro, leek, gar­lic, and dried sour­dough. The stew puhā­di, which uses lamb as well as milk, turns out to be “deli­cious when served with the pep­pery gar­nish of crushed leek and gar­lic.”

The Yale Culi­nary Tablets reveal that the Baby­lo­ni­ans, too, enjoyed tuck­ing into the occa­sion­al for­eign meal — which, four mil­len­nia ago, could have meant a bowl of elamū­tum, or “Elamite broth,” named for its ori­gin in Elam in mod­ern-day Iran. Anoth­er dish made with milk, it also calls for sheep­’s blood (“the mix­ture of sour milk and blood may sound odd,” the round­table arti­cle assures us, “but the com­bi­na­tion pro­duces a rich soup with a slight tart­ness”) and dill, which seems to have been the height of exot­ic ingre­di­ents at the time. Tuh’u, a leg-meat stew, has an iden­ti­fi­able descen­dant still eat­en in Iraq today, but that dish uses white turnip instead of the ancient recipe’s red beet. Giv­en that “Jews of Bagh­dad before their expul­sion used red beet,” it’s “tempt­ing to link the recipe to the con­ti­nen­tal Euro­pean borscht.”

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Recon­struct­ing these recipes, which tend to lack quan­ti­ties or pro­ce­dur­al details, has involved edu­cat­ed guess­work. But no oth­er texts in exis­tence can get you clos­er to recon­struct­ing ancient Mesopotami­an cui­sine in your own kitchen. If you’d like to see how that’s done before giv­ing it a try your­self, watch the videos above and below from Max Miller, whose Youtube chan­nel Tast­ing His­to­ry spe­cial­izes in prepar­ing dish­es from ear­li­er stages of civ­i­liza­tion. Not that depar­ture from the recipes as orig­i­nal­ly dic­tat­ed by tra­di­tion would have any con­se­quences. Most of these recipes may date from an era close to the reign of King Ham­mura­bi, but there’s noth­ing in his famous Code about what hap­pens to cooks who make the occa­sion­al sub­sti­tu­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­fes­sor Cooks 4000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Mesopotamia, and Lets You See How They Turned Out

Watch a 4000-Year Old Baby­lon­ian Recipe for Stew, Found on a Cuneiform Tablet, Get Cooked by Researchers from Yale & Har­vard

How to Make Ancient Mesopotami­an Beer: See the 4,000-Year-Old Brew­ing Method Put to the Test

How to Make the Old­est Recipe in the World: A Recipe for Net­tle Pud­ding Dat­ing Back 6,000 BC

Behold the Old­est Writ­ten Text in the World: The Kish Tablet, Cir­ca 3500 BC

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books

in Books, Literature | July 10th, 2025

Image by The USO, via Flickr Com­mons

So you might think that if Stephen King – the guy who wrote such hor­ror clas­sics like Car­rie and The Stand – were to rat­tle off his top ten favorite books, it would fea­ture works by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Love­craft or maybe J. R. R. Tolkien — authors who have, like King, cre­at­ed endur­ing dark, Goth­ic worlds filled with super­nat­ur­al events and malev­o­lent forces. But you’d be wrong. Author J. Ped­er Zane asked scores of writ­ers about their favorite nov­els for his 2007 book The Top Ten: Writ­ers Pick Their Favorite Books. The list King sub­mit­ted in reply appears below. When pos­si­ble, we’ve added links to the texts that you can read for free online.

1. The Gold­en Argosy, The Most Cel­e­brat­ed Short Sto­ries in the Eng­lish Lan­guage – edit­ed by Van Cart­mell and Charles Grayson

2. The Adven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn – Mark Twain

3. The Satan­ic Vers­es – Salman Rushdie

4. McTeague – Frank Nor­ris

5. Lord of the Flies – William Gold­ing

6. Bleak House – Charles Dick­ens

7. 1984 – George Orwell

8. The Raj Quar­tet – Paul Scott

9. Light in August – William Faulkn­er

10. Blood Merid­i­an – Cor­mac McCarthy

King, it seems, prefers books that explore basic defects in the human char­ac­ter to spooky tales of fan­ta­sy. In oth­er words, he’s inter­est­ed in sto­ries that are actu­al­ly ter­ri­fy­ing. Orwell’s por­trait of a man break­ing under the pres­sure of total­i­tar­i­an­ism or William Golding’s para­ble about a group of boys devolv­ing into beasts are down­right trou­bling. Frank Norris’s saga about the men­da­cious McTeague isn’t exact­ly com­fort­ing either. And McCarthy’s grim and spec­tac­u­lar­ly vio­lent mas­ter­piece Blood Merid­i­an might make you crawl into a fetal posi­tion and weep for human­i­ty. (That was my reac­tion, any­way.)

The most strik­ing thing about the list, how­ev­er, is how uni­form­ly high­brow it is. All books would fit right in on the syl­labus of an upper lev­el Eng­lish col­lege course. On the oth­er hand, David Fos­ter Wal­lace, when asked for his top ten, filled his list with such mass mar­ket crowd pleasers as The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Har­ris, The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clan­cy and, at num­ber two, King’s The Stand.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen King Rec­om­mends 96 Books for Aspir­ing Writ­ers to Read

How Stephen King Pre­dict­ed the Rise of Trump in a 1979 Nov­el

Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Stephen King Explains the Key to His Cre­ativ­i­ty: Not Los­ing the Dream-State Think­ing All Chil­dren Are Born With

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

J. R. R. Tolkien Reads from The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings & Other Works

in Literature | July 7th, 2025

If you want­ed to hear the voice of your favorite writer in the nine­teen-six­ties — a time before audio­books, let alone pod­casts — you con­sult­ed the cat­a­log of Caed­mon Records. That label spe­cial­ized in LPs of lit­er­ary emi­nences read­ing their own work. This may or may not be the kind of com­pa­ny in which you’d expect to find a writer of high fan­ta­sy like J. R. R. Tolkien. But in 1967, just as The Lord of the Rings was enjoy­ing a burst of coun­ter­cul­ture-dri­ven pop­u­lar­i­ty, the label put out the album Poems and Songs of Mid­dle-Earth, which you can sam­ple above.

Tolkien’s voice had been put on a com­mer­cial record just once before, in 1930, years before he’d pub­lished even The Hob­bit. That was for a series of Eng­lish lessons by Arthur Lloyd James, the ill-fat­ed pho­neti­cian who pio­neered stan­dards of pro­nun­ci­a­tion in broad­cast­ing. Tolkien had already estab­lished him­self at Oxford as a philol­o­gist, which may have had some­thing to do with his selec­tion to par­tic­i­pate in such a project.

Not that Tolkien him­self sound­ed quite like the ide­al BBC announc­er, but then, the vast read­er­ship he would lat­er accrue with his nov­els would­n’t have want­ed him to — and indeed, they’d thrill par­tic­u­lar­ly to the record­ings he would make not in Eng­lish at all, but in Quenya and Sin­darin, two Elvish lan­guages of his own inven­tion. The album’s sec­ond side is tak­en up by The Road Goes Ever On, a song cycle adapt­ed from Tolkien’s poems of Mid­dle-Earth by pro­lif­ic com­pos­er and per­former Don­ald Swann.

Lat­er, in the sev­en­ties, the now defunct label would assem­ble the mate­r­i­al for two more releas­es fea­tur­ing the author’s voice and the author’s voice alone, one with selec­tions from The Hob­bit and The Fel­low­ship of the Ring and anoth­er with selec­tions from The Two Tow­ers and The Return of The King. By that time, there was a large and recep­tive mar­ket for such prod­uct. “I pre­sume that most peo­ple who buy this record will already have read Pro­fes­sor Tolkien’s tetral­o­gy,” say the lin­er notes for Poems and Songs of Mid­dle-Earth, describ­ing that tetral­o­gy as “a work that will either total­ly enthrall you or leave you stone cold, and, whichev­er your response, noth­ing and nobody will ever change it.” The writer adds that, “as a mem­ber of the enchant­ed par­ty, I have found by expe­ri­ence that it is quite use­less to argue with the uncon­vert­ed.” His name: W. H. Auden.

Relat­ed con­tent:

J. R. R. Tolkien, Using a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hob­bit for 30 Min­utes (1952)

J. R. R. Tolkien Writes & Speaks in Elvish, a Lan­guage He Invent­ed for The Lord of the Rings

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit in Vin­tage Record­ings from the Ear­ly 1950s

When J. R. R. Tolkien Worked for the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary and “Learned More … Than Any Oth­er Equal Peri­od of My Life” (1919–1920)

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

J. R. R. Tolkien in His Own Words

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Igor Stravinsky’s “Illegal” Arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner” (1944)

in Music | July 4th, 2025

In 1939, Igor Stravin­sky emi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States, first arriv­ing in New York City, before set­tling in Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts, where he deliv­ered the Charles Eliot Nor­ton lec­tures at Har­vard dur­ing the 1939–40 aca­d­e­m­ic year. While liv­ing in Boston, the com­pos­er con­duct­ed the Boston Sym­pho­ny and, on one famous occa­sion, he decid­ed to con­duct his own arrange­ment of “The Star-Span­gled Ban­ner,” which he made out of a “desire to do my bit in these griev­ous times toward fos­ter­ing and pre­serv­ing the spir­it of patri­o­tism in this coun­try.” The date was Jan­u­ary 1944. And he was, of course, refer­ring to Amer­i­ca’s role in World War II.

As you might expect, Stravin­sky’s ver­sion of “The Star-Span­gled Ban­ner” was­n’t entire­ly con­ven­tion­al, see­ing that it added a dom­i­nant sev­enth chord to the arrange­ment. And the Boston police, not exact­ly an orga­ni­za­tion with avant-garde sen­si­bil­i­ties, issued Stravin­sky a warn­ing, claim­ing there was a law against tam­per­ing with the nation­al anthem. (They were mis­read­ing the statute.) Grudg­ing­ly, Stravin­sky pulled it from the bill.

You can hear Stravin­sky’s “Star-Span­gled Ban­ner” above, appar­ent­ly per­formed by the Lon­don Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra, and con­duct­ed by Michael Tilson Thomas. The YouTube video fea­tures an apoc­ryphal mugshot of Stravin­sky. Despite the mythol­o­gy cre­at­ed around this event, Stravin­sky was nev­er arrest­ed.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear The Rite of Spring Con­duct­ed by Igor Stravin­sky Him­self: A Vin­tage Record­ing from 1929

How Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring Incit­ed a Riot? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Igor Stravin­sky Appears on Amer­i­can Net­work TV & Tells Sto­ries About His Uncon­ven­tion­al Musi­cal Life (1957)

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct The Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

Listen to Never-Before-Heard Works by Erik Satie, Performed 100 Years After His Death

in Music | June 29th, 2025

If asked to name our favorite French com­pos­er of the late nine­teenth or ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, most of us would reach straight for Erik Satie, being able to bring to mind only his most famous pieces, the Gymnopédies and per­haps the Gnossi­ennes. We may not know that those works all date from the same few years of his career between the late eigh­teen-eight­ies and the ear­ly nineties. They also rep­re­sent only a small por­tion indeed of his artis­tic out­put, which includes a great deal of instru­men­tal and vocal music as well as com­po­si­tions for dra­mat­ic works, writ­ten between 1886 and his death in 1925 — the com­ing hun­dredth anniver­sary of which is being cel­e­brat­ed with the record­ing of new­ly dis­cov­ered pieces.

As the Guardian’s Dalya Alberge writes, these “twen­ty-sev­en pre­vi­ous­ly unheard works by Erik Satie, from play­ful cabaret songs to min­i­mal­ist noc­turnes” have been “painstak­ing­ly pieced togeth­er from hun­dreds of small note­books,” most of them writ­ten “in the bohemi­an bistros of Mont­martre in Paris where Satie worked as a pianist.”

Their redis­cov­ery owes to the efforts of two com­posers, James Nye and Sato Mat­sui, who “tracked down the lost mate­r­i­al in var­i­ous archival col­lec­tions, includ­ing the Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France.” They’ve now been record­ed by pianist Alexan­dre Tha­raud, and you can hear the result­ing album, Satie: Dis­cov­er­ies, in the Youtube playlist at the top of the post.

Famous in his native France and else­where, Tha­raud’s pro­fes­sion­al involve­ment with the work of his esteemed pre­de­ces­sor and coun­try­man goes back to at least 2009, when he orga­nized a Satie Day at Paris’ Cité de la Musique. That same year, he record­ed Satie’s 1915 com­po­si­tions Avant-dernières Pen­sées, or “Penul­ti­mate Thoughts. Once dis­missed as minor, even by the com­poser’s enthu­si­asts, the Avant-dernières Pen­sées have since risen in sta­tus to become some of his most often per­formed lat­er works. With the 27 short pieces that con­sti­tute Dis­cov­er­ies, Tha­raud’s chal­lenge was­n’t to come up with a fresh rein­ter­pre­ta­tion, but the very first inter­pre­ta­tion any of us will ever have heard, leav­ing it to the next cen­tu­ry of pianists to put their own spins on them.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Ani­mat­ed Scores of Eric Satie’s Most Famous Pieces: “Gymno­pe­die No. 1” and “Gnossi­enne No. 1”

How Erik Satie’s ‘Fur­ni­ture Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Way for Ambi­ent Music

Watch the 1917 Bal­let “Parade”: Cre­at­ed by Erik Satie, Pablo Picas­so & Jean Cocteau, It Pro­voked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Sur­re­al­ism”

The Vel­vet Underground’s John Cale Plays Erik Satie’s Vex­a­tions on I’ve Got a Secret (1963)

A Son­ic Intro­duc­tion to Avant-Garde Music: Stream 145 Min­utes of 20th Cen­tu­ry Art Music, Includ­ing Mod­ernism, Futur­ism, Dadaism & Beyond

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Very First Coloring Book, The Little Folks’ Painting Book (Circa 1879)

in Coloring Books, History | June 25th, 2025

Fun­ny how not that long ago col­or­ing books were con­sid­ered the exclu­sive domain of chil­dren. How times have changed. If you are the sort of adult who unwinds with a big box of Cray­olas and pages of man­dalas or out­lines of Ryan Gosling, you owe a debt of grat­i­tude to the McLough­lin Broth­ers and illus­tra­tor Kate Green­away.

Their Lit­tle Folks’ Paint­ing Book burst onto the scene in around 1879 with such fun-to-col­or out­line engrav­ings as “The Owl’s Advice,” “A Flower Fairy,” and “Lit­tle Miss Pride,” each accom­pa­nied by nurs­ery rhymes and sto­ries. The abun­dance of mob caps, pinafores, and breech­es is of a piece with Green­away’s endur­ing takes on nurs­ery rhymes, though grown-up man­u­al dex­ter­i­ty seems almost manda­to­ry giv­en the tiny pat­terns and oth­er details.

See­ing as how there was no prece­dent, the pub­lish­ers of the world’s first col­or­ing book went ahead and filled in the fron­tispiece so that those tack­ling the oth­er hun­dred draw­ings would know what to do. (Hint: Stay inside the lines and don’t get too cre­ative with skin or hair col­or.)

Also note: the copy rep­re­sent­ed here has been care­ful­ly hand-col­ored by the pre­vi­ous own­ers, with one con­tribut­ing some exu­ber­ant scrib­bles in pen­cil. See the full book, and down­load it in var­i­ous for­mats, at Archive.org.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Col­or­ing Books from Libraries & Muse­ums: Down­load & Col­or Thou­sands of Free Images (2024)

The First Adult Col­or­ing Book: See the Sub­ver­sive Exec­u­tive Col­or­ing Book From 1961

Free Col­or­ing Books from The Pub­lic Domain Review: Down­load & Col­or Works by Hoku­sai, Albrecht Dür­er, Har­ry Clarke, Aubrey Beard­s­ley & More

A Free Shake­speare Col­or­ing Book: While Away the Hours Col­or­ing in Illus­tra­tions of 35 Clas­sic Plays

How Art Conservators Restore Old Paintings & Revive Their Original Colors

in Art | June 23rd, 2025

We tend to imag­ine old paint­ings as hav­ing a mut­ed, yel­low-brown cast, and not with­out rea­son. Many of the exam­ples we’ve seen in life real­ly do look that way, though usu­al­ly not because the artist intend­ed it. As Julian Baum­gart­ner of Chicago’s Baum­gart­ner Fine Art Restora­tion explains in the video above, these paint­ings’ col­ors have changed over the decades, or in any case appeared to change, because of the lay­er of resin on top of them. When that kind of coat­ing is first applied, it actu­al­ly makes the hues under­neath look rich­er. As time pass­es, alas, chem­i­cal changes and the accu­mu­la­tion of dirt and grime can result in a dull, even sick­ly appear­ance.

“A lot of peo­ple say that the var­nish should nev­er be removed, “that that’s a pati­na that is on the sur­face of the paint­ing and that it adds to the paint­ing’s qual­i­ty: it makes the paint­ing look bet­ter, it makes it look more seri­ous,” says Baum­gart­ner.

“Those are all inter­est­ing opin­ions, but they’re all inac­cu­rate. If the artist want­ed to apply a pati­na to their paint­ing, they could apply a pati­na and tone down the col­ors. But most artists, when they apply a var­nish, do not envi­sion that that var­nish will ever become yel­low or brown, or will crack or become cloudy.” The idea is to get the col­ors back to how the artist would have seen them when the work first attained its fin­ished state.

There­in lies the dif­fer­ence between a paint­ing and, say, a cast-iron skil­let. But on some lev­el, the actu­al labor of clean­ing a work of art — as Baum­gart­ner demon­strates, sped-up, in the video — dif­fers less than one might imag­ine from that of clean­ing a kitchen imple­ment. The result, how­ev­er, can cer­tain­ly be more strik­ing, espe­cial­ly with a can­vas like this one, whose twin-sis­ter sub­jects pro­vide an ide­al means of show­ing the con­trast between col­ors long cov­ered by var­nish and those same col­ors new­ly exhumed. Though there now exist for­mu­las that don’t turn yel­low in quite the same way, more than a few artists stick to the clas­sic damar var­nish, which does have advan­tages of its own — not least keep­ing a few more gen­er­a­tions of con­ser­va­tors in busi­ness.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary

A Deter­mined Art Con­ser­va­tor Restores a Paint­ing of the Doomed Par­ty Girl Isabel­la de’ Medici: See the Before and After

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

Watch the Tate Mod­ern Restore Mark Rothko’s Van­dal­ized Paint­ing, Black on Maroon: 18 Months of Work Con­densed Into 17 Min­utes

The Joy of Watch­ing Old, Dam­aged Things Get Restored: Why the World is Cap­ti­vat­ed by Restora­tion Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Enter an Archive of 10,000+ Historical Children’s Books, All Digitized & Free to Read Online

in Books, K-12 | June 19th, 2025

We can learn much about how a his­tor­i­cal peri­od viewed the abil­i­ties of its chil­dren by study­ing its chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture. Occu­py­ing a space some­where between the pure­ly didac­tic and the non­sen­si­cal, most children’s books pub­lished in the past few hun­dred years have attempt­ed to find a line between the two poles, seek­ing a bal­ance between enter­tain­ment and instruc­tion. How­ev­er, that line seems to move clos­er to one pole or anoth­er depend­ing on the pre­vail­ing cul­tur­al sen­ti­ments of the time. And the very fact that children’s books were hard­ly pub­lished at all before the ear­ly 18th cen­tu­ry tells us a lot about when and how mod­ern ideas of child­hood as a sep­a­rate cat­e­go­ry of exis­tence began.

“By the end of the 18th cen­tu­ry,” writes New­cas­tle Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor M.O. Gren­by, “children’s lit­er­a­ture was a flour­ish­ing, sep­a­rate and secure part of the pub­lish­ing indus­try in Britain.” The trend accel­er­at­ed rapid­ly and has nev­er ceased—children’s and young adult books now dri­ve sales in pub­lish­ing (with 80% of YA books bought by grown-ups for them­selves).

Gren­by notes that “the rea­sons for this sud­den rise of children’s lit­er­a­ture” and its rapid expan­sion into a boom­ing mar­ket by the ear­ly 1800s “have nev­er been ful­ly explained.” We are free to spec­u­late about the social and ped­a­gog­i­cal winds that pushed this his­tor­i­cal change.

Or we might do so, at least, by exam­in­ing the children’s lit­er­a­ture of the Vic­to­ri­an era, per­haps the most inno­v­a­tive and diverse peri­od for children’s lit­er­a­ture thus far by the stan­dards of the time. And we can do so most thor­ough­ly by sur­vey­ing the thou­sands of mid- to late 19th cen­tu­ry titles at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Florida’s Bald­win Library of His­tor­i­cal Children’s Lit­er­a­ture. Their dig­i­tized col­lec­tion cur­rent­ly holds over 10,000 books free to read online from cov­er to cov­er, allow­ing you to get a sense of what adults in Britain and the U.S. want­ed chil­dren to know and believe.

Sev­er­al gen­res flour­ished at the time: reli­gious instruc­tion, nat­u­ral­ly, but also lan­guage and spelling books, fairy tales, codes of con­duct, and, espe­cial­ly, adven­ture stories—pre-Hardy Boys and Nan­cy Drew exam­ples of what we would call young adult fic­tion, these pub­lished prin­ci­pal­ly for boys. Adven­ture sto­ries offered a (very colo­nial­ist) view of the wide world; in series like the Boston-pub­lished Zig Zag and Eng­lish books like Afloat with Nel­son, both from the 1890s, fact min­gled with fic­tion, nat­ur­al his­to­ry and sci­ence with bat­tle and trav­el accounts. But there is anoth­er dis­tinc­tive strain in the children’s lit­er­a­ture of the time, one which to us—but not nec­es­sar­i­ly to the Victorians—would seem con­trary to the impe­ri­al­ist young adult nov­el.

For most Vic­to­ri­an stu­dents and read­ers, poet­ry was a dai­ly part of life, and it was a cen­tral instruc­tion­al and sto­ry­telling form in children’s lit. The A.L.O.E.’s Bible Pic­ture Book from 1871, above, presents “Sto­ries from the Life of Our Lord in Verse,” writ­ten “sim­ply for the Lord’s lambs, rhymes more read­i­ly than prose attract­ing the atten­tion of chil­dren, and fas­ten­ing them­selves on their mem­o­ries.” Chil­dren and adults reg­u­lar­ly mem­o­rized poet­ry, after all. Yet after the explo­sion in children’s pub­lish­ing the for­mer read­ers were often giv­en infe­ri­or exam­ples of it. The author of the Bible Pic­ture Book admits as much, beg­ging the indul­gence of old­er read­ers in the pref­ace for “defects in my work,” giv­en that “the vers­es were made for the pic­tures, not the pic­tures for the vers­es.”

This is not an author, or per­haps a type of lit­er­a­ture, one might sus­pect, that thinks high­ly of children’s aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties.  We find pre­cise­ly the oppo­site to be the case in the won­der­ful Elfin Rhymes from 1900, writ­ten by the mys­te­ri­ous “Nor­man” with “40 draw­ings by Car­ton Moorepark.” Who­ev­er “Nor­man” may be (or why his one-word name appears in quo­ta­tion marks), he gives his read­ers poems that might be mis­tak­en at first glance for unpub­lished Christi­na Ros­set­ti vers­es; and Mr. Moorepark’s illus­tra­tions rival those of the finest book illus­tra­tors of the time, pre­sag­ing the high qual­i­ty of Calde­cott Medal-win­ning books of lat­er decades. Elfin Rhymes seems like a rare odd­i­ty, like­ly pub­lished in a small print run; the care and atten­tion of its lay­out and design shows a very high opin­ion of its read­ers’ imag­i­na­tive capa­bil­i­ties.

This title is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of an emerg­ing genre of late Vic­to­ri­an children’s lit­er­a­ture, which still tend­ed on the whole, as it does now, to fall into the trite and for­mu­la­ic. Elfin Rhymes sits astride the fan­ta­sy boom at the turn of the cen­tu­ry, her­ald­ed by huge­ly pop­u­lar books like Frank L. Baum’s Wiz­ard of Oz series and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. These, the Har­ry Pot­ters of their day, made mil­lions of young peo­ple pas­sion­ate read­ers of mod­ern fairy tales, rep­re­sent­ing a slide even fur­ther away from the once quite nar­row, “remorse­less­ly instruc­tion­al… or deeply pious” cat­e­gories avail­able in ear­ly writ­ing for chil­dren, as Gren­by points out.

Where the bound­aries for kids’ lit­er­a­ture had once been nar­row­ly fixed by Latin gram­mar books and Pilgrim’s Progress, by the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry, the influ­ence of sci­ence fic­tion like Jules Verne’s, and of pop­u­lar super­nat­ur­al tales and poems, pre­pared the ground for com­ic books, YA dystopias, magi­cian fic­tion, and dozens of oth­er children’s lit­er­a­ture gen­res we now take for grant­ed, or—in increas­ing­ly large numbers—we buy to read for our­selves. Enter the Bald­win Library of His­tor­i­cal Children’s Lit­er­a­ture here, where you can browse sev­er­al cat­e­gories, search for sub­jects, authors, titles, etc, see full-screen, zoomable images of book cov­ers, down­load XML ver­sions, and read all of the over 10,000+ books in the col­lec­tion with com­fort­able read­er views.

Note: This is an updat­ed ver­sion of a post that orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Children’s Pic­ture Book, 1658’s Orbis Sen­su­al­i­um Pic­tus

Hayao Miyaza­ki Selects His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

The 100 Great­est Children’s Books of All Time, Accord­ing to 177 Books Experts from 56 Coun­tries

A Dig­i­tal Archive of 1,800+ Children’s Books from UCLA

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

Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

in Uncategorized | June 12th, 2025

One of the very first fea­ture-length sci-fi films ever made, Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis took a dar­ing visu­al approach for its time, incor­po­rat­ing Bauhaus and Futur­ist influ­ences in thrilling­ly designed sets and cos­tumes. Lang’s visu­al lan­guage res­onat­ed strong­ly in lat­er decades. The film’s rather stun­ning alchem­i­cal-elec­tric trans­fer­ence of a woman’s phys­i­cal traits onto the body of a destruc­tive android—the so-called Maschi­nen­men­sch— began a very long trend of female robots in film and tele­vi­sion, most of them as dan­ger­ous and inscrutable as Lang’s. And yet, for all its many imi­ta­tors, Metrop­o­lis con­tin­ues to deliv­er sur­pris­es. Here, we bring you a new find: a 32-page pro­gram dis­trib­uted at the film’s 1927 pre­miere in Lon­don and recent­ly re-dis­cov­ered.

In addi­tion to under­writ­ing almost one hun­dred years of sci­ence fic­tion film and tele­vi­sion tropes, Metrop­o­lis has had a very long life in oth­er ways: Inspir­ing an all-star sound­track pro­duced by Gior­gio Moroder in 1984, with Fred­die Mer­cury, Lover­boy, and Adam Ant, and a Kraftwerk album.

In 2001, a recon­struct­ed ver­sion of Metrop­o­lis received a screen­ing at the Berlin Film Fes­ti­val, and UNESCO’s Mem­o­ry of the World Reg­is­ter added it to their ros­ter. 2002 saw the release of an excep­tion­al Metrop­o­lis-inspired ani­me with the same title. And in 2010 an almost ful­ly restored print of the long-incom­plete film—recut from footage found in Argenti­na in 2008—appeared, adding a lit­tle more sophis­ti­ca­tion and coher­ence to the sim­plis­tic sto­ry­line.

Even at the film’s ini­tial recep­tion, with­out any miss­ing footage, crit­ics did not warm to its sto­ry. For all its intense visu­al futur­ism, it has always seemed like a very quaint, naïve tale, struck through with earnest reli­gios­i­ty and inex­plic­a­ble archaisms. Con­tem­po­rary review­ers found its nar­ra­tive of gen­er­a­tional and class con­flict uncon­vinc­ing. H.G. Wells—“something of an author­i­ty on sci­ence fiction”—pronounced it “the sil­li­est film” full of “every pos­si­ble fool­ish­ness, cliché, plat­i­tude, and mud­dle­ment about mechan­i­cal progress and progress in gen­er­al served up with a sauce of sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty that is all its own.” Few were kinder when it came to the sto­ry, and despite its overt reli­gious themes, many saw it as Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da.

Viewed after sub­se­quent events in 20th cen­tu­ry Ger­many, many of the film’s scenes appear “dis­turbing­ly pre­scient,” writes the Unaf­fil­i­at­ed Crit­ic, such as the vision of a huge indus­tri­al machine as Moloch, in which “bald, under­fed humans are led in chains to a fur­nace.” Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou—who wrote the nov­el, then screenplay—were of course com­ment­ing on indus­tri­al­iza­tion, labor con­di­tions, and pover­ty in Weimar Ger­many. Metrop­o­lis’s “clear mes­sage of clas­sism,” as io9 writes, comes through most clear­ly in its arrest­ing imagery, like that hor­ri­fy­ing, mon­strous fur­nace and the “loom­ing sym­bol of wealth in the Tow­er of Babel.”

The visu­al effects and spec­tac­u­lar set pieces have worked their mag­ic on almost every­one (Wells exclud­ed) who has seen Metrop­o­lis. And they remain, for all its silli­ness, the pri­ma­ry rea­son for the movie’s cul­tur­al preva­lence. Wired calls it “prob­a­bly the most influ­en­tial sci-fi movie in his­to­ry,” remark­ing that “a sin­gle movie poster from the orig­i­nal release sold for $690,000 sev­en years ago, and is expect­ed to fetch even more at an auc­tion lat­er this year.”

We now have anoth­er arti­fact from the movie’s pre­miere, this 32-page pro­gram, appro­pri­ate­ly called “Metrop­o­lis” Mag­a­zine, that offers a rich feast for audi­ences, and text at times more inter­est­ing than the film’s script. (You can view the pro­gram in full here.) One imag­ines had they pos­sessed back­lit smart phones, those ear­ly movie­go­ers might have found them­selves strug­gling not to browse their pro­grams while the film screened. But, of course, Metrop­o­lis’s visu­al excess­es would hold their atten­tion as they still do ours. Its scenes of a futur­is­tic city have always enthralled view­ers, film­mak­ers, and (most) crit­ics, such that Roger Ebert could write of “vast futur­is­tic cities” as a sta­ple of some of the best sci­ence fic­tion in his review of the 21st-cen­tu­ry ani­mat­ed Metrop­o­lis—“visions… goofy and yet at the same time exhil­a­rat­ing.”

The pro­gram real­ly is an aston­ish­ing doc­u­ment, a trea­sure for fans of the film and for schol­ars. It’s full of pro­duc­tion stills, behind-the-scenes arti­cles and pho­tos, tech­ni­cal minu­ti­ae, short columns by the actors, a bio of Thea von Har­bou, the “authoress,” excerpts from her nov­el and screen­play placed side-by-side, and a short arti­cle by her. There’s a page called “Fig­ures that Speak” that tal­lies the pro­duc­tion costs and cast and crew num­bers (includ­ing very crude draw­ings and num­bers of “Negroes” and “Chi­nese”). Lang him­self weighs in, lacon­i­cal­ly, with a breezy intro­duc­tion fol­lowed by a clas­sic silent-era line: “if I can­not suc­ceed in find­ing expres­sion on the pic­ture, I cer­tain­ly can­not find it in speech.” Film his­to­ry agrees, Lang found his expres­sion “on the pic­ture.”

“Only three sur­viv­ing copies of this pro­gram are known to exist,” writes Wired, and one of them, from which these pages come, has gone on sale at the Peter Har­ring­ton rare book shop for 2,750 pounds ($4,244)—which seems rather low, giv­en what an orig­i­nal Metrop­o­lis poster went for. But mar­kets are fick­le, and what­ev­er its cur­rent or future price, ”Metrop­o­lis” Mag­a­zine is invalu­able to cineast­es. See all 32 pages of the pro­gram at Peter Harrington’s web­site.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 1927 Film Metrop­o­lis Cre­at­ed a Dystopi­an Vision of What the World Would Look Like in 2026–and It Hits Close to Home

Fritz Lang First Depict­ed Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence on Film in Metrop­o­lis (1927), and It Fright­ened Peo­ple Even Then

If Fritz Lang’s Icon­ic Film Metrop­o­lis Had a Kraftwerk Sound­track

Behold Beau­ti­ful Orig­i­nal Movie Posters for Metrop­o­lis from France, Swe­den, Ger­many, Japan & Beyond

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