Today is a cultural-sports Saturday. Nadya and I took our bikes and went to the largest library in the world — the Library of Congress. I had been interested in Norman Rockwell, an illustrator who worked for The Saturday Evening Post. This magazine has been published from 1821 to the present day. Until the 1960s, it was published weekly. So, I was curious to browse through the archives. Couldn’t find them in regular libraries, and so Nadya and I registered at the Library of Congress. Now we have a separate entrance For Researchers. It must be said, registration took 5 minutes, and all you need is to bring an ID and your face for a photo.
Today was the second attempt to obtain the archive. The first, two weeks ago, failed. I had formulated the request poorly (like give me any issue from such a year to such), waited an hour while they processed it, and ultimately got asked to be more specific, by which time the library was closing. This morning I was ready and received two volumes. Several issues from May 1945 and 1950.
I specifically chose issues from May 1945 to see the place that the war theme occupied in the press at the time. The year 1950 was chosen more or less at random.
We sat in the main reading room — the very one from the first picture. It’s very quiet there, and Nadya periodically jabbed me in the side with her elbow if I turned the pages too loudly.
Now, about the magazine itself. It has very few photographs and the publications are accompanied by many colored illustrations and a lot of drawn advertising. It’s very unusual because that’s not the case anymore. Now, illustrations in a typical magazine are photographs or diagrams. It’s very hard to find something where an artist illustrates the text with oil or watercolor on every page. On archive.org, the magazine issues look very shoddy — black and white, with low contrast. Compare that with what I attached to this post.
The advertising deserves a discussion of its own. It’s completely different from nowadays. I will write about this separately tomorrow or the day after.
Also worth noting is that in the issues from the second half of May 1945, there is nothing at all about the successes of someone there on the front overseas. Yet every, every ad and many articles somehow involve the theme “the war is ongoing”. I should also write about this separately.
In general, we’ll return there some Saturday this year again. I want to look at the archives from the roaring twenties, the great depression, and the swinging sixties.
Meanwhile, wait for my follow-up on the impressions the magazine made.
P.S. By the way, it turns out that if you subscribe to the magazine on the website, access to the entire archive in color and high quality is provided for free. I subscribed. For 15 dollars, it will send the magazine six times a year, give access to the digital version, and to the archive from the 1860s
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 