Saturday, April 23, 2005

Utah Digital Newspapers project

I recently came across the Utah Digital Newspapers project, an on-line collection of digitized newspapers. So far, the project has scanned a bunch of mostly small town Utah newspapers dating from before and around the turn-of-the-century. There are also a handful of digitized papers dating from the 1920's and 1930's. I did a search under "Louise Brooks" and found a dozen ads for different films. These simple text advertisements, which are akin to listings, are typical of small town ads I have seen in newspapers from other states. In themselves, they are not very interesting, except as a record of which film showed where and when.

The most interesting was an 1929 ad for Just Another Blonde, which ran in the Murray Eagle. The film was being screened, for one day only, on Sunday, May 19th at the Gem Theatre. (The ad described the film as "a thrill packed story of a Romance that was made in heaven - and remade on Earth!") Just Another Blonde, a silent film, was first released in December of 1926. It's intertesting that it was still being screened some two-and-one-half years later, and once talkies had come arrived.

Along with the Utah Digital Newspapers project, I have also looked through similar efforts, including the Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection and the Missouri Newspaper Archive.

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