Site Updates

Added a few more images to the Vintage Magazine Covers page, including a 1926 Danish magazine with Louise Brooks on the cover. Also, scanned my recent eBay purchase of a 1928 issue of Film Weekly with Brooks on the cover. That image was also added to the aforementioned page. Recently, I added a page of vintage Related Magazine Covers, though there are only three examples. Hopefully, I will find others.

S.S. Van Dine

Recently finished reading Alias S.S. Van Dine, a biography by John Loughery of the man who wrote The Canary Murder Case. I enjoyed the book a good deal, and would recommend it to those interested in 20th century American cultural history. Willard Huntington Wright (aka S. S. Van Dine) was an interesting, though perhaps disagreeable, person who knew many leading figures of the time. (Louise Brooks is mentioned in passing in this book; she had the left the set of the Canary Murder Case by the time Van Dine arrived to lend his then considerable fame to the film.) Having finished the biography, I then decided to read the celebrated mystery novel which served as the basis for the 1929 film. As of today, I am nearly through with the book. Just about 50 pages to go. I will finish it, though I find the book somewhat tedious.

New material

Yesterday, I received photocopies of some six dozen vintage clippings from various Philadelphia newspapers. The clippings are part of the Philadelphia newspaper morgue housed at Temple University. (I came across a reference to this material while searching for newspaper archives on the internet.) Though the clippings I received were mostly small, wire service articles from the 1930's, they are of some interest. Citations for this material have been added to the appropriate bibliographies.

Through interlibrary loans over the last few months, I have been slowly working my way through the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Syracuse Post-Standard, Chicago Daily News, and Newark Star Eagle - and have recently started looking through the Houston Chronicle, Omaha World Herald, Seattle Times and Birmingham News. Last week, I also spent a day at home looking through some of the websites which reproduce old newspapers. There, I found scattered articles and reviews from a number of small town newspapers such as the Reno Gazette from Nevada, Denton Journal from Maryland, and Daily Northwestern from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. One goal behind this research is to accumulate a representitive selection of reviews from across the United States.

One of the websites I looked through had some Canadian and Mexican newspapers. While I didn't find any articles about Brooks or her films in these North American newspapers, I did manage to find advertisements for the actress' films. The best material were some half-dozen advertisements for films featuring Luisa Brooks in Il Informador from Guadalajara, Mexico.

Sacramento trip

At the California State Library in Sacremento, I looked through the Pasadena Star-News, La Opinion and some Los Angeles newspapers for the period of the mid-to-late 1920's. I found a bunch of film reviews, advertisements and articles in the Pasadena newspaper, but little in La Opinion. (This Spanish-language paper, based in Los Angeles, ran frequent articles on Hispanic film stars such as Dolores del Rio, Raquel Torres, Ramon Navarro, etc . . . , but nothing that I could find on Louise Brooks.) I also took the time to search through four Los Angeles newspapers for material on Just Another Blonde, Evening Clothes and The City Gone Wild. My efforts in this regard were successful, and I found reviews, articles, ads and more. Citations for all of the material that I have found have been aded to the bibliographies.