The Silver Screen Oasis

My goodness, what a treasure! This is the next best thing since the digitizing of Life magazine with free access via Google.

This Internet Archive-based project is even better -- you can read online or download in a variety of formats, including PDF.

And the nice thing about the PDFs is that they are text-based rather than image-based so we can search them for key words.

It looks like this will be only pre-1964 issues which are in the public domain, but that's still a huge resource.

I love the Internet Archive and am a contributor there myself.

Thank you so much for the heads-up, Miss Goddess!

Wow, I love this! I had a few books highlighting movie magazines when I was a kid, and the info (whether or not it was made up) is fascinating. Thanks, MissG for posting this.

This is great! I really enjoy being able to find this online. I have a minor collection of classic sheet music, and some of the items I have date to this time. Thanks, Miss G!

A thanks from me too, Miss G

Via "Google" book/magazine search I found complete issues of vintage LIFE magazines...here is the link to the first page of search results:

http://books.google.com/books/serial/IS ... 19?rview=1

I love looking at these magazines, especially LIFE and LOOK with all the variety of news and daily life articles, not to mention the ads.

Here, from the November 9, 1953 issue, is a series of cartoons poking
fun at the "new craze" which is new again, 3-D:

You must be psychic, Miss G. I was just thinking of you earlier today. The Internet Archive has added additional scanned copies of Photoplay to their online library at this link:
http://archive.org/search.php?query=photoplay&page=1

You can peruse and copy images and entire articles from the magazine for the following years now: 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940

Thank you, Moira! I visited the archive today and tried to search for magazines but I didn't look up Photoplay. I look forward to seeing those!

I found out that all the Photoplays from 1914-1940 are now online at the Media History Digital Library, along with numerous scans of other film magazines from the period.
http://mediahistoryproject.org/fanmagazines/

It looks as though this would be ideal reading for a rainy day (remember those?)

Wow! That's a great resource. I'm skimming through the 1935 Photoplay collection, and I'm already finding a lot of interesting information.

By the way, I recently found an an archive of many Classic Images magazine articles on Archive.org's Wayback Machine. While the archived Classic Images articles are themselves fairly recent (1996 - 1999), they are all about classic movies. Just a few of the articles include: Maureen O'Sullivan's final interview, a multi-issue biography of Tom Mix, an article about Lauren Bacall's singing, and interviews with Clint Walker and George "Commando Cody" Wallace.

Here's a page with links to each issue of Classic Images, listed by issue number and month, and divided by year. Each link leads to a page with links to some of the articles from that particular issue. While only four years worth of Classic Images is archived here, and while not every single issue nor every article from each issue is available, it's still a pretty good resource.

http://web.archive.org/web/200108052223 ... nline.html

I may never be heard from again if I go back to that Photoplay archive. The clothes, the stories, the photos, the silly hats... I can see me opening a page to one of those years (1939 is a fave so far), and disappearing like an episode of the Twilight Zone. (Directed by Ida Lupino, of course!)

Sue Sue Applegate wrote:I may never be heard from again if I go back to that Photoplay archive. The clothes, the stories, the photos, the silly hats... I can see me opening a page to one of those years (1939 is a fave so far), and disappearing like an episode of the Twilight Zone. (Directed by Ida Lupino, of course!)

At least you'll have company, I'll be looking at those magazines for weeks.

Thanks for this resource! Just the other day, I was searching for pictures of old photoplay magazine covers for an art project, and wondering where I could actually read some of the articles.

Great news! A vast array of more of the 20th century's periodicals related to motion pictures have recently been gathered and made readily searchable by a group called Lantern who have expanded access to the holdings of The Media History Digital Library and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Communication Arts..

You can see more about Lantern here:
http://lantern.mediahist.org/