The Internet Archive Launches Democracy’s Library, a Free Online Library of 500,000 Documents Supporting Democracy

“Democ­ra­cy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment except all those oth­er forms that have been tried from time to time.” So said Win­ston Churchill, per­haps not sus­pect­ing how fre­quent­ly the remark would be quot­ed in the decades there­after. Time and expe­ri­ence con­tin­ue to reveal to us democ­ra­cy’s lia­bil­i­ties, but also — at least in cer­tain soci­eties — the nature of its sur­pris­ing stay­ing pow­er. Since well before Churchill’s time, democ­ra­cy and its work­ings have been objects of fas­ci­na­tion the world over. So have its cen­tral ques­tions, not least the one of just how to main­tain the “informed cit­i­zen­ry” on which its oper­a­tion sup­pos­ed­ly depends.

The Inter­net Archive has just launched its own kind of answer in the form of Democ­ra­cy’s Library. “A free, open, online com­pendi­um of gov­ern­ment research and pub­li­ca­tions from around the world,” the site offers cit­i­zens a way to “lever­age use­ful research, learn about the work­ings of their gov­ern­ment, hold offi­cials account­able, and be more informed vot­ers.”

Col­lect­ed from a vari­ety of gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies like the Unit­ed States’ Nation­al Agri­cul­tur­al LibraryFor­eign Broad­cast Infor­ma­tion Ser­vice, and Nation­al Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Tech­nol­o­gy Research Library — as well as Sta­tis­tics Cana­da and Pub­lic Accounts of Cana­da — its mate­ri­als were osten­si­bly pro­duced for the pub­lic, but haven’t always been easy to find. It total, there are more than 500,000 doc­u­ments in the col­lec­tion.

“Gov­ern­ments have cre­at­ed an abun­dance of infor­ma­tion and put it in the pub­lic domain, but it turns out the pub­lic can’t eas­i­ly access it,” says Brew­ster Kahle, founder of the Inter­net Archive. He gives one of the series of talks that com­prise “Build­ing Democ­ra­cy’s Library,” the launch cel­e­bra­tion that took place last week and that you can still watch in the video above. Its pro­ceed­ings go into quite a bit of detail about the efforts of acqui­si­tion and orga­ni­za­tion that went into this project, as well as the nature of its mis­sion. For this isn’t just an effort to doc­u­ment democ­ra­cy, but to strength­en it by mak­ing the infor­ma­tion it pro­duces avail­able as con­ve­nient­ly as pos­si­ble to as many cit­i­zens as pos­si­ble. And no mat­ter the coun­try of which you count your­self a cit­i­zen, you can start brows­ing Democ­ra­cy’s Library here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der Presents 20 Lessons for Defend­ing Democ­ra­cy Against Tyran­ny in a New Video Series

Why Socrates Hat­ed Democ­ra­cies: An Ani­mat­ed Case for Why Self-Gov­ern­ment Requires Wis­dom & Edu­ca­tion

Han­nah Arendt Explains Why Democ­ra­cies Need to Safe­guard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Them­selves Against Dic­ta­tors and Their Lies

Does Democ­ra­cy Demand the Tol­er­ance of the Intol­er­ant? Karl Popper’s Para­dox

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.

10,000 Vintage Recipe Books Are Now Digitized in The Internet Archive’s Cookbook & Home Economics Collection

“Ear­ly cook­books were fit for kings,” writes Hen­ry Notak­er at The Atlantic. “The old­est pub­lished recipe col­lec­tions” in the 15th and 16th cen­turies in West­ern Europe “emanat­ed from the palaces of mon­archs, princes, and grand señores.” Cook­books were more than recipe collections—they were guides to court eti­quette and sump­tu­ous records of lux­u­ri­ous liv­ing. In ancient Rome, cook­books func­tioned sim­i­lar­ly, as the extrav­a­gant fourth cen­tu­ry Cook­ing and Din­ing in Impe­r­i­al Rome demon­strates.

Writ­ten by Api­cius, “Europe’s old­est [cook­book] and Rome’s only one in exis­tence today”—as its first Eng­lish trans­la­tor described it—offers “a bet­ter way of know­ing old Rome and antique pri­vate life.” It also offers keen insight into the devel­op­ment of heav­i­ly fla­vored dish­es before the age of refrig­er­a­tion. Api­cus rec­om­mends that “cooks who need­ed to pre­pare birds with a ‘goat­ish smell’ should bathe them in a mix­ture of pep­per, lovage, thyme, dry mint, sage, dates, hon­ey, vine­gar, broth, oil and mus­tard,” Melanie Radz­ic­ki McManus notes at How Stuff Works.

Ear­ly cook­books com­mu­ni­cat­ed in “a folksy, impre­cise man­ner until the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion of the 1800s,” when stan­dard (or met­ric) mea­sure­ment became de rigueur. The first cook­book by an Amer­i­can, Amelia Sim­mons’ 1796 Amer­i­can Cook­ery, placed British fine din­ing and lav­ish “Queen’s Cake” next to “john­ny cake, fed­er­al pan cake, buck­wheat cake, and Indi­an slap­jack,” Kei­th Stave­ly and Kath­leen Fitzger­ald write at Smith­son­ian, all recipes sym­bol­iz­ing “the plain, but well-run and boun­ti­ful Amer­i­can home.” With this book, “a dia­logue on how to bal­ance the sump­tu­ous with the sim­ple in Amer­i­can life had begun.”

Cook­books are win­dows into history—markers of class and caste, doc­u­ments of dai­ly life, and snap­shots of region­al and cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty at par­tic­u­lar moments in time. In 1950, the first cook­book writ­ten by a fic­tion­al lifestyle celebri­ty, Bet­ty Crock­er, debuted. It became “a nation­al best-sell­er,” McManus writes. “It even sold more copies that year than the Bible.” The image of the per­fect Step­ford house­wife may have been big­ger than Jesus in the 50s, but Crock­er’s career was decades in the mak­ing. She debuted in 1921, the year of pub­li­ca­tion for anoth­er, more hum­ble recipe book: the Pil­grim Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church Ladies’ Aid Soci­ety of Chicago’s Pil­grim Cook Book.

As Ayun Hal­l­i­day not­ed in an ear­li­er post, this charm­ing col­lec­tion fea­tures recipes for “Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauer­kraut Can­dy,” and it’s only one of thou­sands of such exam­ples at the Inter­net Archive’s Cook­book and Home Eco­nom­ics Col­lec­tion, drawn from dig­i­tized spe­cial col­lec­tions at UCLA, Berke­ley, and the Prelinger Library. When we last checked in, the col­lec­tion fea­tured 3,000 cook­books. It has grown since 2016 to a library of 10,600 vin­tage exam­ples of home­spun Amer­i­cana, fine din­ing, and mass mar­ket­ing.

Laugh at gag-induc­ing recipes of old; cringe at the pious advice giv­en to women osten­si­bly anx­ious to please their hus­bands; and mar­vel at how var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al and region­al cuisines have been rep­re­sent­ed to unsus­pect­ing Amer­i­can home cooks. (It’s hard to say whether the cov­er or the con­tents of a Chi­nese Cook Book in Plain Eng­lish from 1917 seem more offen­sive.) Cook­books of recipes from the Amer­i­can South are pop­u­lar, as are cov­ers fea­tur­ing stereo­typ­i­cal “mam­my” char­ac­ters. A more respect­ful inter­na­tion­al exam­ple, 1952’s Luchow’s Ger­man Cook­book gives us “the sto­ry and the favorite dish­es of Amer­i­ca’s most famous Ger­man restau­rant.”

There are guides to mush­rooms and “com­mon­er fun­gi, with spe­cial empha­sis on the edi­ble vari­eties”; col­lec­tions of “things moth­er used to make” and, most prac­ti­cal­ly, a cook­book for left­overs. And there is every oth­er sort of cook­book and home ec. man­u­al you could imag­ine. The archive is stuffed with help­ful hints, rare ingre­di­ents, unex­pect­ed region­al cook­eries, and mil­lions of minute details about the habits of these books’ first hun­gry read­ers.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

Archive of Hand­writ­ten Recipes (1600 – 1960) Will Teach You How to Stew a Calf’s Head and More

A Data­base of 5,000 His­tor­i­cal Cookbooks–Covering 1,000 Years of Food History–Is Now Online

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

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Vienna’s Albertina Museum Puts 150,000 Digitized Artworks Into the Public Domain: Klimt, Munch, Dürer, and More

Though it may not fig­ure promi­nent­ly into the aver­age whirl­wind Eurail trip across the con­ti­nent, Vien­na’s role in the devel­op­ment of Euro­pean cul­ture as we know it can hard­ly be over­stat­ed. Grant­ed, the names of none of its cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions come mind as read­i­ly as those of the Pra­do, the Uffizi Gallery, or the Lou­vre. But as muse­ums go, Vien­na more than holds its own, both inside and out­side the neigh­bor­hood apt­ly named the Muse­um­squarti­er — and not just in the phys­i­cal world, but online as well. Recent­ly, the Alberti­na Muse­um in Vien­na put into the pub­lic domain 150,000 of its dig­i­tized works, all of which you can browse on its web site.

“Con­sid­ered to have one of the best col­lec­tions of draw­ings and prints in the world,” says Medievalists.net, the Alberti­na boasts “a large col­lec­tion of works by Albrecht Dür­er (1471–1528), a Ger­man artist who was famous for his wood­cut prints and a vari­ety of oth­er works.” Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured the genius of Dür­er as revealed by his famed self-por­traits. We’ve also fea­tured visu­al exege­ses of the art of Vien­na’s own Gus­tav Klimt as well as Edvard Munch, two more recent Euro­pean artists of great (and indeed still-grow­ing) repute, works from both of whom you’ll find avail­able to down­load in the Alberti­na’s online archive.

Those inter­est­ed in the devel­op­ment of Dür­er, Klimt, Munch, and oth­er Euro­pean mas­ters will espe­cial­ly appre­ci­ate the Alberti­na’s online offer­ings. As an insti­tu­tion renowned for its large print room and col­lec­tions of draw­ings, the muse­um has made avail­able a great many sketch­es and stud­ies, some of which clear­ly informed the icon­ic works we all rec­og­nize today. But there are also com­plete works as well, on which you can focus by click­ing the “High­lights” check­box above your search results. To under­stand Europe, you’d do well to begin in Vien­na; to under­stand Europe’s art — includ­ing its pho­tog­ra­phy, its posters, and its archi­tec­ture, each of which gets its own sec­tion of the archive — you’d do well to begin at the Alberti­na online.

via Medievalists.net

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Genius of Albrecht Dür­er Revealed in Four Self-Por­traits

136 Paint­ings by Gus­tav Klimt Now Online (Includ­ing 63 Paint­ings in an Immer­sive Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty Gallery)

Explore 7,600 Works of Art by Edvard Munch: They’re Now Dig­i­tized and Free Online

30,000 Works of Art by Edvard Munch & Oth­er Artists Put Online by Norway’s Nation­al Muse­um of Art

Take Immer­sive Vir­tu­al Tours of the World’s Great Muse­ums: The Lou­vre, Her­mitage, Van Gogh Muse­um & Much More

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Oakland Public Library Puts Online a Collection of Items Forgotten in Library Books: Love Notes, Doodles & More

Librar­i­ans are cham­pi­ons of orga­ni­za­tion, and among its best prac­ti­tion­ers.

Books are shelved accord­ing to the Dewey Dec­i­mal sys­tem.

Cat­e­gories are assigned using Library of Con­gress Rule Inter­pre­ta­tions, Library of Con­gress Sub­ject Head­ings, and Library of Con­gress Clas­si­fi­ca­tion.

And Sharon McKel­lar, the Teen Ser­vices Depart­ment Head at the Oak­land Pub­lic Library, col­lects ephemera she and oth­er staffers find in books returned to the OPL’s 18 loca­tions.

It’s an impulse many share. 

Even­tu­al­ly, she began scan­ning them to share on her employ­er’s web­site, inspired by Found Mag­a­zine, a crowd­sourced col­lec­tion of found let­ters, birth­day cards, kids’ home­work, to-do lists, hand­writ­ten poems, doo­dles, dirty pic­tures, etc.

As Found’s cre­ators, Davy Roth­bart and Jason Bit­ner, write on the magazine’s web­site:

We cer­tain­ly didn’t invent the idea of found stuff being cool. Every time we vis­it our friends in oth­er towns, someone’s always got some kind of unbe­liev­able dis­cov­ered note or pho­to on their fridge. We decid­ed to make a bunch of projects so that every­one can check out all the strange, hilar­i­ous and heart­break­ing things peo­ple have picked up and passed our way.

McKel­lar told NPR that her project “lets us be a lit­tle bit nosy. In a very anony­mous way, it’s like read­ing peo­ple’s secret diaries a lit­tle bit but with­out know­ing who they are.”

The finds, which she stores in a box under her desk pri­or to scan­ning and post­ing, are push­ing 600, with more arriv­ing all the time.

Search­able cat­e­gories include notes, cre­ative writ­ing, art, and pho­tos.

One arti­fact, the scat­o­log­i­cal one-of-a-kind zine Mr Men #48, excerpt­ed above, spans four cat­e­gories, includ­ing kids, a high­ly fer­tile source of both humor and heart­break.

There’s a dis­tinct­ly dif­fer­ent vibe to the items that chil­dren forge for them­selves or each oth­er, as opposed to work cre­at­ed for school, or as presents for the adults in their lives.

McKel­lar admits to hav­ing a sweet spot for their inad­ver­tent con­tri­bu­tions, which com­prise the bulk of the col­lec­tion.

She also cat­a­logues the throw­away fly­ers, tick­et stubs and lists that adult read­ers use to mark their place in a book, but when it comes to place­hold­ers with more obvi­ous poten­tial for sen­ti­men­tal val­ue, she finds her­self won­der­ing if a library patron has acci­den­tal­ly lost track of a pre­cious object:

Does the per­son miss that item? Do they regret hav­ing lost it or were they care­less with it because they actu­al­ly did­n’t share those deep and pro­found feel­ings with the per­son who wrote [it]?

Actu­al book­marks are not exempt…

Future plans include a pos­si­ble writ­ing con­test for short sto­ries inspired by items in the col­lec­tion.

Browse the Found in a Library Book col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Pub­lic Library Receipt Shows How Much Mon­ey You’ve Saved by Bor­row­ing Books, Instead of Buy­ing Them

Free Col­or­ing Books from World-Class Libraries & Muse­ums: Down­load & Col­or Hun­dreds of Free Images

The New York Pub­lic Library Cre­ates a List of 125 Books That They Love

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

30,000 Photographs of Black History & Culture Are Available Online in a New Getty Images Archive


Image of Charles S.L. Bak­er with his Super­heat­ing Demon­stra­tion

Black His­to­ry Month is Feb­ru­ary in the Unit­ed States and Cana­da, and Octo­ber in the Unit­ed King­dom and Europe. It may be July right now, but if you’re inter­est­ed in a sub­ject, there’s no rea­son not to get more deeply into it all year round. This is under­scored by the open­ing, this month, of Get­ty Images’ Black His­to­ry and Cul­ture Col­lec­tion. As Petapix­el’s Matt Grow­coot writes, it con­tains “30,000 rarely seen images of the Black dias­po­ra in the Unit­ed King­dom and the Unit­ed States that date back to the 19th cen­tu­ry,” draw­ing from the domains of “pol­i­tics, sport, music, cul­ture, mil­i­tary, and celebri­ty.”

In the Black His­to­ry and Cul­ture Col­lec­tion you’ll find pic­tures of cul­tur­al fig­ures like Duke Elling­ton and Jay‑Z, Jack John­son, Venus and Ser­e­na Williams, Sojourn­er Truth, and Bernar­dine Evaris­to. These names only hint at the range of the archive, which you can also browse by cat­e­go­ry tags: “civ­il rights,” “gov­er­nance,” and “sports,” to name a few exam­ples, but also “fam­i­lies,” “fash­ion,” and “hair.”

There are, of course, an enor­mous num­ber of pho­tos filed under “Amer­i­can Cul­ture,” which would itself be unimag­in­able with­out the con­tri­bu­tions of the peo­ple doc­u­ment­ed. But the same could be said of the oth­er side of the pond; hence the inclu­sion of a “Black British Cul­ture” label as well.

Cre­at­ing the Black His­to­ry and Cul­ture Col­lec­tion involved more than just tag­ging pho­tos. You can learn more about what went into it in the short video above, which includes the voic­es of col­lab­o­ra­tors like NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Deb­o­rah Willis and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­ni­a’s Tuku­fu Zuberi. The artist Rena­ta Cherlise speaks of the val­ue of the images of famous peo­ple, but also those of every­day life as it was lived in places and times like Harlem’s Savoy Ball­room in the nine­teen-for­ties. Whether or not your own her­itage is tied into this his­to­ry, you stand to learn a great deal from it. As Zuberi put sit, “Black cul­ture is the orig­i­nal human cul­ture, so there is no cul­ture that is alien to black cul­ture. The future of black cul­ture is the future of human cul­ture. Let’s go.”

via Petapix­el/Colossal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Take Free Online Cours­es on African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry from Yale and Stan­ford: From Eman­ci­pa­tion, to the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, and Beyond

The Names of 1.8 Mil­lion Eman­ci­pat­ed Slaves Are Now Search­able in the World’s Largest Genealog­i­cal Data­base, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans Find Lost Ances­tors

The Black Film Archive: A New Site High­lights 200+ Note­wor­thy Black Films Made Between 1915–1979

Hear the Voic­es of Amer­i­cans Born in Slav­ery: The Library of Con­gress Fea­tures 23 Audio Inter­views with For­mer­ly Enslaved Peo­ple (1932–75)

Pho­tos of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Black Women Activists Dig­i­tized and Put Online by The Library of Con­gress

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

An Online Archive of Beautiful, Early 20th Century Japanese Postcards

The world thinks of Japan as hav­ing trans­formed itself utter­ly after its defeat in the Sec­ond World War. And indeed it did, into what by the nine­teen-eight­ies looked like a gleam­ing, tech­nol­o­gy-sat­u­rat­ed con­di­tion of ultra-moder­ni­ty. But the stan­dard ver­sion of moder­ni­ty, as con­ceived of in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry with its trains, tele­phones, and elec­tric­i­ty, came to Japan long before the war did. “Between 1900 and 1940, Japan was trans­formed into an inter­na­tion­al, indus­tri­al, and urban soci­ety,” writes Muse­um of Fine Arts Boston cura­tor Anne Nishimu­ra Morse. “Post­cards — both a fresh form of visu­al expres­sion and an impor­tant means of adver­tis­ing — reveal much about the dra­mat­i­cal­ly chang­ing val­ues of Japan­ese soci­ety at the time.”

These words come from the intro­duc­to­ry text to the MFA’s 2004 exhi­bi­tion “Art of the Japan­ese Post­card,” curat­ed from an archive you can vis­it online today. (The MFA has also pub­lished it in book form.) You can browse the vin­tage Japan­ese post­cards in the MFA’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions in themed sec­tions like archi­tec­ture, women, adver­tis­ing, New Year’s, Art Deco, and Art Nou­veau.

These rep­re­sent only a tiny frac­tion of the post­cards pro­duced in Japan in the first decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, when that new medi­um “quick­ly replaced the tra­di­tion­al wood­block print as the favored tableau for con­tem­po­rary Japan­ese images. Hun­dreds of mil­lions of post­cards were pro­duced to meet the demands of a pub­lic eager to acquire pic­tures of their rapid­ly mod­ern­iz­ing nation.”

The ear­li­est Japan­ese post­cards “were dis­trib­uted by the gov­ern­ment in con­nec­tion with the Rus­so-Japan­ese War (1904–5), to pro­mote the war effort. Almost imme­di­ate­ly, how­ev­er, many of Japan’s lead­ing artists — attract­ed by the infor­mal­i­ty and inti­ma­cy of the post­card medi­um — began to cre­ate stun­ning designs.” The work of these artists is col­lect­ed in a ded­i­cat­ed sec­tion of the online archive, where you’ll find post­cards by the com­mer­cial graph­ic-design pio­neer Sug­uira Hisui; the French-edu­cat­ed, high­ly West­ern-influ­enced Asai Chi; the mul­ti­tal­ent­ed Ota Saburo, known as the illus­tra­tor of Kawa­ba­ta Yasunar­i’s The Scar­let Gang of Asakusa; and Nakaza­wa Hiromit­su, cre­ator of the “div­er girl” long well-known among Japan­ese-art col­lec­tors.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, Nakaza­wa’s div­er girl (also known as the “mer­maid,” but most cor­rect­ly as “Hero­ine Mat­suza­ke” of a pop­u­lar play at the time) seems not to have been among the pos­ses­sions of cos­met­ics bil­lion­aire and art col­lec­tor Leonard A. Laud­er, who donat­ed more than 20,000 Japan­ese selec­tions from his vast post­card col­lec­tion to the MFA. “In 1938 or ’39, a boy of five or six, or maybe sev­en, was so enthralled by the beau­ty of a post­card of the Empire State Build­ing that he took his entire five-cent allowance and bought five of them,” writes the New York­er’s Judith H. Dobrzyn­s­ki. The young­ster thrilling to the paper image of a sky­scraper was, of course, Laud­er — who could­n’t have known how much, in that moment, he had in com­mon with the equal­ly moder­ni­ty-intox­i­cat­ed peo­ple on the oth­er side of the world.

via Flash­bak

Relat­ed con­tent:

Adver­tise­ments from Japan’s Gold­en Age of Art Deco

Vin­tage 1930s Japan­ese Posters Artis­ti­cal­ly Mar­ket the Won­ders of Trav­el

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

An Eye-Pop­ping Col­lec­tion of 400+ Japan­ese Match­box Cov­ers: From 1920 through the 1940s

View 103 Dis­cov­ered Draw­ings by Famed Japan­ese Wood­cut Artist Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Explore a Big Archive of Vintage Early Comics: 1700–1929

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of graph­ic nov­els (and more than a few extreme­ly lucra­tive super­hero movie fran­chis­es) have con­ferred respectabil­i­ty on comics.

Hand­some reis­sues of such stun­ning ear­ly works as Win­sor McKay’s Lit­tle Nemo in Slum­ber­land, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, and Frank King’s Walt and Skeez­ix sug­gest that read­ers’ appetite for vin­tage comics extends deep­er and fur­ther back than mere nos­tal­gia for the Sun­day fun­nies of their youth.

Artist Andy Bleck’s Andy’s Ear­ly Comics Archive is an excel­lent resource for those seek­ing to dis­cov­er ear­ly exam­ples of the form that have yet to be reis­sued in a col­lect­ed edi­tion. (Fair warn­ing: reflect­ing the atti­tudes of the time, the col­lec­tion does inevitably con­tains some racist imagery. Such imagery won’t be on dis­play in this post.)

Bleck, the cre­ator of Konky Kru, a beau­ti­ful­ly sim­ple, word­less series, as well as sev­er­al self-pub­lished mini comics, takes a historian’s inter­est in his sub­ject, begin­ning with the William Hog­a­rth engrav­ings A Harlot’s Progress from 1730:

The famous ‘pro­gres­sions’ by Hog­a­rth were not actu­al­ly comics. The images don’t lead into and don’t inter­act with each oth­er. Each shows a dis­tinct, sep­a­rate stage of a longer sto­ry. How­ev­er, because of their great pop­u­lar­i­ty, they estab­lished the very notion of telling enter­tain­ing sto­ries with a series of pic­tures and so became a high­ly influ­en­tial step­ping stone for future devel­op­ments.

He also cites the influ­ence of British polit­i­cal car­toons, Chi­nese wood­cuts, illus­trat­ed fairy tales and nurs­ery rhymes, and Hein­rich Hoff­man­n’s Struwwelpeter, a book that ter­ri­fied chil­dren into behav­ing by depict­ing the mon­strous con­se­quences befalling those who failed to do so.

Iron­i­cal­ly, Franz Joseph Goez’s Lenar­do und Blan­dine, an actu­al graph­ic nov­el­ette from 1783, “prob­a­bly had lit­tle influ­ence:”

 It was too ahead of its time as far as the com­ic struc­ture is con­cerned. In con­tent, it was delight­ful­ly very much of its time, full of out­ra­geous melo­dra­ma.

Things con­tin­ued to evolve in the sec­ond half of the 19th-cen­tu­ry, with pic­ture broad­sheets for chil­dren, such as the ones star­ring Wil­helm Busch’s wild­ly pop­u­lar Max and Moritz. (See an Eng­lish trans­la­tion here.)

Bleck traces the birth of mod­ern comics, whose sto­ry­telling vocab­u­lary con­tin­ues today, to the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tu­ry, with Amer­i­can news­pa­per strips and par­tic­u­lar­ly, the Sun­day fun­nies:

The news­pa­per for­mat was much larg­er and cheap­er, pro­vid­ing a lot more emp­ty space to fill. The audi­ence was less sophis­ti­cat­ed, but (pos­si­bly because of this) more open to a par­tic­u­lar type of exper­i­men­ta­tion, despite the dumb and low­brow humor… these Amer­i­can Sun­day pages became the breed­ing ground for some­thing new. Weird­er, rougher, slap­dashier. Also eas­i­er, for chil­dren, but not child­ish. More pop­u­lar. More … some­thingi­er.

Maybe it was that new type of human being, the urban immi­grant, who was most pre­pared and eager to pay for all this new visu­al goings on.

Andy’s Ear­ly Comics Archive can be searched chrono­log­i­cal­ly, or alpha­bet­i­cal­ly by artist’s name. Enter here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Read The Very First Com­ic Book: The Adven­tures of Oba­di­ah Old­buck (1837)

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

The Marcel Duchamp Research Portal Opens, Making Available 18,000 Documents and 50,000 Images Related to the Revolutionary Artist

Mar­cel Duchamp made films, com­posed music, paint­ed Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, No. 2, designed an art deco chess set, and of course — the first thing most of us learn about him, as well as the last thing many of us learn about him — he put a uri­nal in an art gal­ley. But as you might expect of an artist who spent the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry at the heart of the avant-garde, there’s more to him than that. This notion is backed up by the more than 18,000 doc­u­ments and 50,000 images made avail­able at the Duchamp Research Por­tal, a new­ly opened archive ded­i­cat­ed to the life and work of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary con­cep­tu­al artist.

The fruit of a sev­en-year col­lab­o­ra­tion between the Philadel­phia Muse­um of Art, the Asso­ci­a­tion Mar­cel Duchamp, and the Cen­tre Pom­pi­dou, this for­mi­da­ble dig­i­tal col­lec­tion includes many arti­facts relat­ed to the artist’s best-known work: the “large glass” of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bach­e­lors, Even; the mus­ta­chioed Mona Lisa; the shock­ing attempts to com­mit phys­i­cal motion to can­vas; and that uri­nal, Foun­tain.

But its “most inter­est­ing items,” writes The Art News­pa­per’s Daniel Cas­sady, “are often the most inti­mate and involve oth­er major play­ers in the evo­lu­tion of 20th-cen­tu­ry art. A 1950 let­ter — with enig­mat­ic mar­gin­a­lia — from Bre­ton. A 1933 post­card to Con­stan­tin Brân­cuși. Many can­did pho­tographs by Duchamp’s friend and fel­low giant of the era, Man Ray.”

These names will be famil­iar to read­ers of Open Cul­ture, where we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Brân­cuși on film and por­traits of 1920s cul­tur­al icons by Man Ray — who, as we can see from the above snap­shot of Duchamp at his Span­ish home, did­n’t always work so for­mal­ly. But then, no artist can ful­ly be under­stood through what makes it into the art-his­to­ry text­books alone. Browse the Duchamp Research Por­tal (or click “show me more” to change up the images on its front page) and you’ll see pieces of an artis­tic life ful­ly lived: the floor plan of his West 67th Street stu­dio; a 1940 telegram to Amer­i­can patron Wal­ter Con­rad Arens­berg (“HOLDING SHIPMENT OF MASK AWAITING CONFIRMATION OF INSURANCE AND ADDRESS”); a 1954 French news­pa­per pro­file; and a series of images jux­ta­pos­ing Duchamp with an unclothed Eve Bab­itz, the late Los Ange­les “it-girl” — not just the famous one of them play­ing chess.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Mar­cel Duchamp Read “The Cre­ative Act,” A Short Lec­ture on What Makes Great Art, Great

Mar­cel Duchamp, Chess Enthu­si­ast, Cre­at­ed an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Avail­able via 3D Print­er

Anémic Ciné­ma: Mar­cel Duchamp’s Whirling Avant-Garde Film (1926)

Hear the Rad­i­cal Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions of Mar­cel Duchamp (1912–1915)

What Made Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal Art — and an Inven­tive Prank

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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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