Download 1,600+ Publications from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Books, Guides, Magazines & More

in Archives, Museums | November 5th, 2024

Many of us in these past few gen­er­a­tions first heard of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art while read­ing E. L. Konigs­burg’s nov­el From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweil­er. More than a few of us also fan­ta­sized about run­ning away to live in that vast cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion like the book’s young pro­tag­o­nists Clau­dia and Jamie Kin­caid. Yet among oth­er, more prac­ti­cal con­cerns, we might have won­dered where we were going to secure enough read­ing mate­r­i­al to get us through those long after-hours nights. Konigs­burg had Clau­dia and Jamie vis­it the for­mer Don­nell Library Cen­ter, but what about in the Met itself?

What we prob­a­bly did­n’t real­ize in our youth was that, in addi­tion to being a muse­um, the Met is a pub­lish­er. Now, at the Met­Pub­li­ca­tions dig­i­tal archive, we can read a great vari­ety of the books, guides, and peri­od­i­cals it’s put out for more than a century–from a 1911 cat­a­log of the muse­um’s col­lec­tion of pot­tery, porce­lain, and faïence (which refers to pot­tery of the tin-glazed vari­ety) to — as of this writ­ing — the lat­est issue of the Met’s Bul­letin, on Mex­i­can print­mak­ers includ­ing Diego Rivera and José Clemente Oroz­co. They and the more than 1,600 pub­li­ca­tions that lie between them are free for you to explore, some read­able online, and some down­load­able in PDF form.

You might find issues of the Bul­letin on every­thing from Frank Lloyd Wright to inter­war pho­tog­ra­phy to Kore­an art, as well as cat­a­logs for exhi­bi­tions like Anglo­Ma­nia: Tra­di­tion and Trans­gres­sion in British Fash­ion, The Art of Illu­mi­na­tion: The Lim­bourg Broth­ers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry (whose cen­tral work of cal­en­dri­cal art was pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), Van Gogh in Arles, The Milk­maid by Johannes Ver­meer, and The Poet­ry of Nature: Edo Paint­ings from the Fish­bein-Ben­der Col­lec­tion. Met­Pub­li­ca­tions offers plen­ty of inter­est­ing read­ing, but if you find you sud­den­ly have to do some seri­ous art-his­tor­i­cal research, you’ll also find that it’s a far more con­ve­nient resource than Clau­dia and Jamie had.

Enter the Met­Pub­li­ca­tions dig­i­tal archive here, and, once there, par­tic­u­lar­ly explore the “Free to Down­load” sec­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Take a New Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

An Unbe­liev­ably Detailed, Hand-Drawn Map Lets You Explore the Rich Col­lec­tions of the Met Muse­um

A World of Art: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Free: Download Over 33,000 Sounds from the BBC Sound Effects Archive

in Archives | September 30th, 2024

There may be a few young peo­ple in Britain today who rec­og­nize the name Lud­wig Koch, but in the nine­teen-for­ties, he con­sti­tut­ed some­thing of a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non unto him­self. He “start­ed record­ing sounds and voic­es in the 1880s when he was still a child” in his native Ger­many, says the web­site of the BBC. After flee­ing from the Nazis, he set­tled in Eng­land, which cre­at­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty for the Beeb to acquire his col­lec­tion of field record­ings, using it to start build­ing its own library of nature sounds. Soon, Koch “became a house­hold name as a nature broad­cast­er,” and his “dis­tinct Ger­man accent and eccen­tric loca­tion record­ings became so well known that he was par­o­died by Peter Sell­ers.”

You can hear 168 of Koch’s field record­ings at the online archive of BBC Sound Effects, whose dig­i­tal hold­ings have in recent years grown to include over 33,000 dif­fer­ent sounds from var­i­ous sources, span­ning more than a cen­tu­ry.

“These include clips made by the BBC Radio­phon­ic work­shop, record­ings from the Blitz in Lon­don, spe­cial effects made for BBC TV and Radio pro­duc­tions, as well as 15,000 record­ings from the Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Unit archive,” says its About page. “You can explore sounds from every con­ti­nent — from the col­lege bells ring­ing in Oxford to a Patag­on­ian water­fall — or lis­ten to a sub­ma­rine klax­on or the sound of a 1969 Ford Corti­na door slam­ming shut.”

The BBC has made all these record­ings free for your own non-com­mer­cial use, as long as you cred­it where they came from. To put them into a com­mer­cial project, you can license them by click­ing “Show details,” and then the “Buy sound” but­ton that appears right below. The archive also offers a “mix­er mode,” which lets you “lay­er, edit and re-order clips from the archive to cre­ate your own sounds,” poten­tial­ly mash­ing up a wide vari­ety of times and places into a sin­gle sound­scape. A chac­ma baboon wield­ing a laser in a Bel­gian café, for instance, or a laugh­ing woman brew­ing a ket­tle of water at a bull­fight in Spain: hard­ly the sort of aur­al scenes that would be intro­duced by Lud­wig Koch, grant­ed, but here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, the only lim­it is your imag­i­na­tion. Enter the BBC Sound Effects Archive here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

NASA Puts Online a Big Col­lec­tion of Space Sounds, and They’re Free to Down­load and Use

How the Sound Effects on 1930s Radio Shows Were Made: An Inside Look

Down­load 1,000+ Dig­i­tized Tapes of Sounds from Clas­sic Hol­ly­wood Films & TV, Cour­tesy of the Inter­net Archive

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

Michael Winslow, the “Man of 10,000 Sound Effects”, Imper­son­ates the Sounds of Jimi Hendrix’s and Led Zeppelin’s Elec­tric Gui­tars with His Voice

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Digital Archive Features Hundreds of Audio Cassette Tape Designs, from the 1960s to the 1990s

in Archives, History, Music, Technology | September 4th, 2024

Audio cas­sette tapes first appeared on the mar­ket in the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties, but it would take about a decade before they came to dom­i­nate it. And when they did, they’d changed the lives of many a music-lover by hav­ing made it pos­si­ble not just to lis­ten to their albums of choice on the go, but also to col­lect and trade their own cus­tom-assem­bled lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences. By the eight­ies, blank tapes had become a house­hold neces­si­ty on the order of bat­ter­ies or toi­let paper for such con­sumers — and just as with those fre­quent­ly replen­ished prod­ucts, every­one seemed to have their favorite brand.


Some pre­ferred tapes from Philips, which devel­oped the for­mat of the Com­pact Cas­sette in the first place. Oth­ers had their pick from Fuji, BASF, Sony, Radio Shack, Scotch (which also made tape of the sticky vari­ety), and a host of oth­er brands besides.

Even some mem­bers of post-cas­sette gen­er­a­tions rec­og­nize the old tagline “Is it live or is it Mem­o­rex?” or Max­el­l’s “Blown Away Guy” in his scarf and LC2. If you’re old enough to have done tap­ing of your own, you don’t need a logo to rec­og­nize your brand; you’ll know it as soon as you spot the design of the cas­sette itself in the online archive at tapedeck.org.


“I built tapedeck.org to show­case the amaz­ing beau­ty and (some­times) weird­ness found in the designs of the com­mon audio tape cas­sette,” writes the site’s cre­ator Oliv­er Gel­brich. “There’s an amaz­ing range of designs, start­ing from the ear­ly 60’s func­tion­al cas­sette designs, mov­ing through the col­or­ful play­ful­ness of the 70’s audio tapes to amaz­ing shape vari­a­tions dur­ing the 80s and 90s.” You can browse the ever-expand­ing col­lec­tion by brand, run­ning time, col­or, and even tape coat­ing: chrome, fer­ro, fer­rochrome, and met­al, by whose dif­fer­ences audio­philes set great store.


Some­what improb­a­bly, in this age where even home CD-burn­ing has been dis­placed by near-instan­ta­neous stream­ing and down­load­ing of dig­i­tal music, the cas­sette tape has made some­thing of a come­back. The near-mytho­log­i­cal allure of the mix­tape has only grown in recent years, dur­ing which artists both minor and major have put out cas­sette releas­es — and in some cas­es, cas­sette-only releas­es. This seems to be hap­pen­ing around the world: a few weeks ago, while strolling an art-school neigh­bor­hood in Seoul, where I live, I passed a cof­fee shop that offered its young cus­tomers rentals of both tapes and Walk­man-style play­ers on which to lis­ten to them. As anoth­er gen­er­a­tion-tran­scend­ing slo­gan has it, every­thing old is new again.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Home Tap­ing Is Killing Music: When the Music Indus­try Waged War on the Cas­sette Tape Dur­ing the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back

Lis­ten to Audio Arts: The 1970s Tape Cas­sette Arts Mag­a­zine Fea­tur­ing Andy Warhol, Mar­cel Duchamp & Many Oth­ers

The Beau­ty of Degrad­ed Art: Why We Like Scratchy Vinyl, Grainy Film, Wob­bly VHS & Oth­er Ana­log-Media Imper­fec­tion

Atten­tion K‑Mart Shop­pers: Hear 90 Hours of Back­ground Music & Ads from the Retail Giant’s 1980s and 90s Hey­day

A Free Dig­i­tal Archive of Graph­ic Design: A Curat­ed Col­lec­tion of Design Trea­sures from the Inter­net Archive

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Download 1,000+ Digitized Tapes of Sounds from Classic Hollywood Films & TV, Courtesy of the Internet Archive

in Archives, Film, Television | September 2nd, 2024

Watch enough clas­sic movies — espe­cial­ly clas­sic movies from slight­ly down­mar­ket stu­dios — and you’ll swear you’ve been hear­ing the very same sound effects over and over again. That’s because you have been hear­ing the very same sound effects over and over again: once record­ed or acquired for one film, they could, of course, be re-used in anoth­er, and anoth­er, and anoth­er. No such fre­quent­ly employed record­ing has a more illus­tri­ous and well-doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry than the so-called “Wil­helm scream,” which, accord­ing to Oliv­er Macaulay at the Sci­ence + Media Muse­um, “has been used in over 400 films and TV pro­grams.”

“First record­ed in 1951, the ‘Wil­helm scream’ was ini­tial­ly fea­tured as stock sound effect in Raoul Walsh’s west­ern Dis­tant Drums,” writes Macaulay, but it got its name from a scene in The Charge at Feath­er Riv­er, from 1953: “When Pri­vate Wil­helm takes an arrow to the leg, he lets out the fabled blood-cur­dling cry which came to per­me­ate Hollywood’s sound­scape.”

It may well have been most wide­ly heard in the orig­i­nal Star Wars, “when Luke Sky­walk­er shoots a stormtroop­er off a ledge,” but for decades it was pulled from the vault when­ev­er “char­ac­ters meet a grim and gris­ly end, from being shot to falling off a build­ing to being caught up in an explo­sion.”

Orig­i­nal­ly labeled “Man eat­en by an alli­ga­tor; screams” (for such was the fate of the char­ac­ter in Dis­tant Drums), the orig­i­nal record­ing ses­sion of this much-dis­cussed sound effect is now down­load­able from the USC Opti­cal Sound Effects Library at the Inter­net Archive. It con­tains three col­lec­tions: the Gold and Red Libraries, which “con­sist of high-qual­i­ty, first gen­er­a­tion copies of orig­i­nal nitrate opti­cal sound effects from the 1930s & 40s cre­at­ed for Hol­ly­wood stu­dios,” and the Sun­set Edi­to­r­i­al (SSE) Library, which “includes clas­sic effects from the 1930s into the ’80s” by the epony­mous out­fit. At a Freesound Blog post about the archiv­ing and preser­va­tion of the SSE Library, audio engi­neer Craig Smith notes that the com­pa­ny “main­ly did episod­ic tele­vi­sion shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jean­nie, The Par­tridge Fam­i­ly, and The Wal­tons.”

Lis­ten­ing through the USC Opti­cal Sound Effects Library will thus prove a res­o­nant expe­ri­ence, as it were, with fans of mid-cen­tu­ry Hol­ly­wood movies and tele­vi­sion alike. It may also inspire an appre­ci­a­tion for the sheer amount of record­ing, index­ing, edit­ing, and mix­ing work that must have gone into even out­ward­ly sim­ple pro­duc­tions, which nev­er­the­less required the sounds of doors, birds, sirens, guns, and falling bod­ies — as well as the voic­es of men, women, chil­dren — to fill out a plau­si­ble audio­vi­su­al atmos­phere. They also reveal, as Smith puts it, “the shared cul­ture of Hol­ly­wood’s take on what things ‘sound­ed like.’ ” Heard in iso­la­tion, some of these may seem no more real­is­tic than the Wil­helm scream, but that was­n’t quite the point; they just had to sound like things do in movies and on TV.

via Mefi

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

How Sounds Are Faked For Nature Doc­u­men­taries: Meet the Artists Who Cre­ate the Sounds of Fish, Spi­ders, Orang­utans, Mush­rooms & More

Down­load an Archive of 16,000 Sound Effects from the BBC: A Fas­ci­nat­ing His­to­ry of the 20th Cen­tu­ry in Sound

The Sounds of Blade Run­ner: How Music & Sound Effects Became Part of the DNA of Rid­ley Scott’s Futur­is­tic World

The Wil­helm Scream is Back

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Browse 64 Years of RadioShack Catalogs Free Online … and Revisit the History of American Consumer Electronics

in Archives, History, Technology | August 30th, 2024

“I bet RadioShack was great once,” writes for­mer employ­ee Jon Bois in a much-cir­cu­lat­ed 2014 piece for SB Nation. “I can’t look through their decades-old cat­a­logs and come away with any oth­er impres­sion. They sold giant wal­nut-wood speak­ers I’d kill to have today. They sold com­put­ers back when peo­ple were try­ing to under­stand what they were. When I was a lit­tle kid, going to RadioShack was bet­ter than going to the toy store. It was the toy store for tall peo­ple.” Yet by the mid-twen­ty-tens, it had become a “pan­icked and half-dead retail empire”; in 2015, it final­ly filed for bank­rupt­cy.

Still, all those cat­a­logs live on, free to browse in the dig­i­tal archive at Radioshackcatalogs.com. The first vol­ume dates from 1939, by which time Radio Shack (as its name was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten) had already been in busi­ness for sev­en­teen years. “This cat­a­log is intend­ed to serve as a com­pre­hen­sive and accu­rate list­ing of what we believe to be the essen­tial and unusu­al require­ments of the radio ama­teur, the ser­vice­man, lab­o­ra­to­ries, indus­tries, and schools,” declares its open­ing let­ter to the cus­tomer. “To boast of our ser­vice in any respect would be so much use­less ver­biage, ser­vice hav­ing been the fea­ture of our growth.”

Nei­ther ser­vice nor growth remained fea­tures of the com­pa­ny by the time Bois was work­ing there. But it had been a pret­ty glo­ri­ous run: to behold the first 50 years of RadioShack cat­a­logs is to behold noth­ing less than the evo­lu­tion of Amer­i­can con­sumer elec­tron­ics. At first direct­ed toward those with seri­ous tech­ni­cal know-how, the com­pa­ny’s offer­ings expand­ed over the decades to appeal to hob­by­ists, then to ordi­nary peo­ple look­ing to intro­duce a bit of elec­tron­ic — and lat­er, dig­i­tal — enrich­ment into their pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al lives.

Some Amer­i­cans found their way to RadioShack by build­ing crys­tal radios and sci­ence-fair projects in child­hood; oth­ers began fre­quent­ing its stores while build­ing their first real hi-fi sys­tem, com­po­nent by com­po­nent; oth­ers still got into per­son­al com­put­ing through the store-brand TRS-80 (or “Trash 80,” as more seri­ous com­put­er nerds called it). My own grand­fa­ther was such a habitué that, when he died ear­ly in the nineties, our house sud­den­ly filled up with inher­it­ed RadioShack-only prod­ucts, from Real­is­tic radios to Tandy com­put­ers. (I remem­ber spend­ing many hap­py hours with the Mod­el 100, a prim­i­tive lap­top grand­ly mar­ket­ed as a “Micro Exec­u­tive Work Sta­tion.”)

“This is a con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy busi­ness that is built to work per­fect­ly in the year 1975,” writes Bois. And indeed, the 1975 RadioShack cat­a­log offers page after won­drous page of remote-con­trolled stere­os (“the ulti­mate in lux­u­ry”) and “action radios”; fiber-optic dec­o­ra­tive light­ing fix­tures, eight-track car tape decks; cal­cu­la­tors promis­ing a “pock­et­ful of mir­a­cles”; and built-it-your­self inter­coms, pock­et lie detec­tors, and “col­or organs.” Alas, like so many com­mer­cial enter­pris­es that rode high in the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, RadioShack failed to take advan­tage of the inter­net, and was ulti­mate­ly crushed by it — an iron­ic fate indeed for what had so long been the one-stop tech­nol­o­gy shop. Enter the archive of RadioShack cat­a­logs here.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

IKEA Dig­i­tizes & Puts Online 70 Years of Its Cat­a­logs: Explore the Designs of the Swedish Fur­ni­ture Giant

A New Online Archive Lets You Read the Whole Earth Cat­a­log and Oth­er Whole Earth Pub­li­ca­tions, Tak­ing You from 1970 to 2002

Watch “Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum,” a Short Satir­i­cal Film About the Inven­tion of the Audio­phile (1959)

Nir­vana Plays in a Radio Shack, the Day After Record­ing its First Demo Tape (1988)

The First Cell­phone: Dis­cov­er Motorola’s DynaT­AC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

One Man’s Quest to Build the Best Stereo Sys­tem in the World

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Public.Work: A Smoothly Searchable Archive of 100,000+ “Copyright-Free” Images

in Archives, Art | August 12th, 2024

We live in an age, we’re often told, when our abil­i­ty to con­jure up an image is lim­it­ed only by our imag­i­na­tion. These days, this notion tends to refer to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered sys­tems that gen­er­ate visu­al mate­r­i­al from text prompts, like DALL‑E and the many oth­ers that have pro­lif­er­at­ed in its wake. But how­ev­er tech­no­log­i­cal­ly impres­sive they are, they also reveal that our imag­i­na­tion has its lim­its, giv­ing form only to what we can put into words. To be inspired prop­er­ly again, we must explore far­ther afield, in the visu­al realms of oth­er times and places, which we can eas­i­ly do on a site like Public.work.

Jason Kot­tke describes Public.work as “an image search engine that boasts 100,000 ‘copy­right-free’ images from insti­tu­tions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast with a rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple inter­face and uses AI to auto-cat­e­go­rize and sug­gest pos­si­bly relat­ed images (both visu­al­ly and con­tent-wise). And it’s fun to just visu­al­ly click around on relat­ed images.”

These jour­neys can take you from vin­tage mag­a­zine cov­ers to for­eign chil­dren’s books, life­like for­eign land­scapes to elab­o­rate world maps, Japan­ese wood­block prints to road­side Amer­i­cana — or such has been my expe­ri­ence, at any rate.

“On the down­side,” Kot­tke adds, “their sourc­ing and attri­bu­tion isn’t great — espe­cial­ly when com­pared to some­thing like Flickr Com­mons.” Accord­ing to librar­i­an Jes­samyn West, Public.work isn’t exact­ly a search engine, but an inter­face for a site called Cos­mos, which describes itself as “a Pin­ter­est alter­na­tive for cre­atives” meant to cre­ate “a more mind­ful inter­net.”

Get­ting the full sto­ry behind any par­tic­u­lar images you find there will require you to put a bit of ener­gy into research, or at least to locate the fruits of research done else­where on the inter­net. As for what you do with them, that will, of course, depend on your own cre­ative instincts. Enter Public.work here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

Cre­ative Com­mons Offi­cial­ly Launch­es a Search Engine That Index­es 300+ Mil­lion Pub­lic Domain Images

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

The Smith­son­ian Puts 4.5 Mil­lion High-Res Images Online and Into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Use

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Free: Down­load 5.3 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Enter a Huge Archive of Amazing Stories, the World’s First Science Fiction Magazine, Launched in 1926

in Archives, Sci Fi | June 26th, 2024

If you haven’t heard of Hugo Gerns­back, you’ve sure­ly heard of the Hugo Award. Next to the Neb­u­la, it’s the most pres­ti­gious of sci­ence fic­tion prizes, bring­ing togeth­er in its ranks of win­ners such ven­er­a­ble authors as Ursu­la K. Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Hein­lein, Neil Gaiman, Isaac Asi­mov, and just about every oth­er sci-fi and fan­ta­sy lumi­nary you could think of. It is indeed fit­ting that such an hon­or should be named for Gerns­back, the Lux­em­bour­gian-Amer­i­can inven­tor who, in April of 1926, began pub­lish­ing “the first and longest-run­ning Eng­lish-lan­guage mag­a­zine ded­i­cat­ed to what was then not quite yet called ‘sci­ence fic­tion,’” notes Uni­ver­si­ty of Virginia’s Andrew Fer­gu­son at The Pulp Mag­a­zines Project. Amaz­ing Sto­ries pro­vid­ed an “exclu­sive out­let” for what Gerns­back first called “sci­en­tific­tion,” a genre he would “for bet­ter and for worse, define for the mod­ern era.” You can read and down­load hun­dreds of Amaz­ing Sto­ries issues, from the first year of its pub­li­ca­tion to the last, at the Inter­net Archive.

Like the exten­sive list of Hugo Award win­ners, the back cat­a­log of Amaz­ing Sto­ries encom­pass­es a host of genius­es: Le Guin, Asi­mov, H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Bal­lard, and many hun­dreds of less­er-known writ­ers. But the mag­a­zine “was slow to devel­op,” writes Scott Van Wyns­berghe. Its lurid cov­ers lured some read­ers in, but its “first two years were dom­i­nat­ed by preprint­ed mate­r­i­al,” and Gerns­back devel­oped a rep­u­ta­tion for finan­cial dodgi­ness and for not pay­ing his writ­ers well or at all.

By 1929, he sold the mag­a­zine and moved on to oth­er ven­tures, none of them par­tic­u­lar­ly suc­cess­ful. Amaz­ing Sto­ries sol­diered on, under a series of edi­tors and with wide­ly vary­ing read­er­ships until it final­ly suc­cumbed in 2005, after almost eighty years of pub­li­ca­tion. But that is no small feat in such an often unpop­u­lar field, with a pub­li­ca­tion, writes Fer­gu­son, that was very often per­ceived as “gar­ish and non­lit­er­ary.”

In hind­sight, how­ev­er, we can see Amaz­ing Sto­ries as a sci-fi time cap­sule and almost essen­tial fea­ture of the genre’s his­to­ry, even if some of its con­tent tend­ed more toward the young adult adven­ture sto­ry than seri­ous adult fic­tion. Its flashy cov­ers set the bar for pulp mag­a­zines and com­ic books, espe­cial­ly in its run up to the fifties. After 1955, the year of the first Hugo Award, the mag­a­zine reached its peak under the edi­tor­ship of Cele Gold­smith, who took over in 1959. Gone was much of the eye­pop­ping B‑movie imagery of the ear­li­er cov­ers. Amaz­ing Sto­ries acquired a new lev­el of rel­a­tive pol­ish and sophis­ti­ca­tion, and pub­lished many more “lit­er­ary” writ­ers, as in the 1959 issue above, which fea­tured a “Book-Length Nov­el by Robert Bloch.”

This trend con­tin­ued into the sev­en­ties, as you can see in the issue above, with a “com­plete short nov­el by Gor­don Eklund” (and ear­ly fic­tion by George R.R. Mar­tin). In 1982, Fer­gu­son writes, Amaz­ing Sto­ries was sold “to Gary Gygax of D&D fame, and would nev­er again regain the promi­nence it had before.” The mag­a­zine large­ly returned to its pulp roots, with cov­ers that resem­bled those of super­mar­ket paper­backs. Great writ­ers con­tin­ued to appear, how­ev­er. And the mag­a­zine remained an impor­tant source for new sci­ence fiction—though much of it only in hind­sight. As for Gerns­back, his rep­u­ta­tion waned con­sid­er­ably after his death in 1967.

“With­in a decade,” writes Van Wyns­berghe, “sci­ence fic­tion pun­dits were debat­ing whether or not he had cre­at­ed a ‘ghet­to’ for hack writ­ers.” In 1986, nov­el­ist Bri­an Ald­iss called Gerns­back “one of the worst dis­as­ters ever to hit the sci­ence fic­tion field.” His 1911 nov­el, the ludi­crous­ly named Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 is con­sid­ered “one of the worst sci­ence fic­tion nov­els in his­to­ry,” writes Matthew Lasar. It may seem odd that the Oscar of the sci-fi world should be named for such a reviled fig­ure. And yet, despite his pro­nounced lack of lit­er­ary abil­i­ty, Gerns­back was a vision­ary. As a futur­ist, he made some star­tling­ly accu­rate pre­dic­tions, along with some not-so-accu­rate ones. As for his sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to a new form of writ­ing, writes Lasar, “It was in Amaz­ing Sto­ries that Gerns­back first tried to nail down the sci­ence fic­tion idea.” As Ray Brad­bury sup­pos­ed­ly said, “Gerns­back made us fall in love with the future.” Enter the Amaz­ing Sto­ries Inter­net Archive here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Down­load Issues of “Weird Tales” (1923–1954): The Pio­neer­ing Pulp Hor­ror Mag­a­zine Fea­tures Orig­i­nal Sto­ries by Love­craft, Brad­bury & Many More

Dis­cov­er the First Hor­ror & Fan­ta­sy Mag­a­zine, Der Orchideen­garten, and Its Bizarre Art­work (1919–1921)

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

 

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Download 131,000 Historic Maps from the Huge David Rumsey Map Collection

in Archives, History, Maps | May 7th, 2024

The world has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly over the past 500 years, albeit not quite as dra­mat­i­cal­ly as how we see the world. That’s just what’s on dis­play at the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion, whose more than 131,000 his­tor­i­cal maps and relat­ed images are avail­able to browse (or down­load) free online. Since we last fea­tured it here on Open Cul­ture, the col­lec­tion has added at least 40,000 items to its dig­i­tal hold­ings, mak­ing it an even more valu­able resource for not just under­stand­ing how human­i­ty has viewed the world through­out the ages, but how we’ve imag­ined it — and, for that mat­ter, how we’ve imag­ined oth­er worlds from Mars to Nar­nia to Kryp­ton.

“Imag­i­nary maps” is just one of the cat­e­gories through which you can explore the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion. There are also tags for news­pa­per maps, time­lines, city maps, celes­tial maps, data visu­al­iza­tions, chil­dren’s maps, and more vari­eties besides.

If you’d pre­fer a more tra­di­tion­al form of orga­ni­za­tion, you can search for maps of spe­cif­ic geo­graph­i­cal regions: North Amer­i­ca, South Amer­i­ca, Europe, Asia, Africa, Aus­tralia, Antarc­ti­ca, the Pacif­ic, the Arc­tic, and of course, the world. If it’s the last item you’re inter­est­ed in, apart from the con­sid­er­able two-dimen­sion­al hold­ings, the inter­ac­tive globes con­sti­tute a gallery of their own, and there you can view ones made between the mid-six­teenth cen­tu­ry and just last year from every pos­si­ble angle.

Among the site’s new fea­tures is a “search by text-on-maps” fea­ture, which you can acti­vate by click­ing the “by Text on Maps” but­ton next to the search win­dow at the top of the page. This lets you com­pare and con­trast the ways par­tic­u­lar places have been labeled on the vari­ety of maps in the col­lec­tion: not just prop­er names like Cairo, Madrid, and Yosemite, but also more gen­er­al terms like “gold mine,” “light­house” or “drag­ons.” Arguably, we look at maps more often here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry than we ever did before, though sel­dom if ever do we depart from whichev­er map­ping app we hap­pen to keep on our phones. It’s worth step­ping back in car­to­graph­i­cal time to remem­ber that there were once as many ways of under­stand­ing the world as there were depic­tions of it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Oculi Mun­di: A Beau­ti­ful Online Archive of 130 Ancient Maps, Atlases & Globes

40,000 Ear­ly Mod­ern Maps Are Now Freely Avail­able Online (Cour­tesy of the British Library)

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

An Archive of 800+ Imag­i­na­tive Pro­pa­gan­da Maps Designed to Shape Opin­ions & Beliefs: Enter Cornell’s Per­sua­sive Maps Col­lec­tion

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

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