Weekly trip to the library

Weekly trip to the library to look at requested microfilm. A few roles of the Cincinnati Enquirer arrived, and I found a short article, review and advertisement for A Social Celebrity. Pinpointing this Cincinnati screening will aid me while I survey the other Cincinnati newspapers when I travel to Ohio next month.

Also arriving were two reels of the Daily City Gate and Constitution-Democrat, from Keokuk, Iowa. This newspaper contained numerous short articles, advertisements and a review of the two Denishawn dance company performances in that small town.

Bounty offered for photocopies of vintage film reviews

The Louise Brooks Society is engaged in a number of long term projects in its attempt to fully document the life and career of Louise Brooks. Your help is needed is acquiring articles and other hard-to-get-to printed material. The LBS will pay $1.00 each for photocopies of film reviews and articles about Louise Brooks from the 1920's or 1930's from newspapers in the following American cities. Photocopies should be legible and the reviews complete. Please note the name of the newspaper, title and author of review (if not included on the photocopy), and date of publication.

San Antonio, TX Fort Worth, TX Houston, TX El Paso, TX Austin, TX Corpus Christi, TX Tampa, FL Jacksonville, FL Peoria, IL Rockford city, IL Springfield, IL Decatur, IL

Scranton, PA Erie, PA Scranton, PA Allentown, PA Harrisburg, PA Reading, PA Knoxville, TN Chattanooga, TN Baton Rouge, LA Shreveport, LA Patterson, NJ Trenton, NJ

South Bend, IN Evansville, IN Gary, IN Utica, NY Troy, NY Schenectady, NY Binghamton, NY Hartford, CT New Haven, CT Albuquerque, NM Santa Fe, NM

Cambridge, MA Worcester, MA Springfield, MA Lowell, MA New Bedford, MA Savannah, GA Little Rock, AR Mobile, AL Charlotte, NC Boise, ID Phoenix, AZ Honolulu, HI Juneau, AK Fairbanks, AK

Please email the LBS with any questions you might have. Thank you very much.

30 million newspaper pages to go online

The National Endowment for the Arts, in conjunction with the Library of Congress - has announced that it is working to put millions of newspaper pages online in a digital / searchable format. The first of what's expected to be 30 million digitized pages from American newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 will be available beginning in 2006.

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities announced the project in a speech at the National Press Club on November 16th. "Anyone who's interested - teachers, students, historians, lawyers, politicians, even newspaper reporters - will be able to go to their computer at home or at work and at a click of a mouse get immediate, unfiltered access to the greatest source of our history."

The time span of the digitization project is limited because type faces used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read, while copyright restrictions prevent newspapers published after 1922 from being scanned and published without permission.

As Louise Brooks' film career didn't start till 1925, the amount of material on the actress which might come to light from this project is severly limited. Nevertheless, depending on which Kansas newspapers are scanned, perhaps some tidbit related to Brooks' early life might surface. There is also hope that some articles or reviews related to Brooks' first season with the Denishawn dance company - which started in 1922 - might also be found.

Google Scholar

The search engine Google has announced the launch of Google Scholar. According to the website, "Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

A search under "Louise Brooks" produces a few interesting results. There are citations for articles from scholarly journals (such as "Consuming Distractions in Prix de beauté," from Camera Obscura), references to the actress in scholarly books, and previously undocumented scholarly papers delivered at conferences from around the world. One I found, "The Overcoming of Desire: Prostitution and the Contract in Pandora’s Box (1929) ," was no longer online but could still found in the Google cache.

One curiousity which turned up was "The ‘arrayjob’package Management of arrays in (La) T E X" by Zhuhan Jiang, an Australian professor of Mathematics and Computing. In this paper, the author used Louise Brooks and the names of other actresses as examples in writing programming language.

Hopefully, more and more scholarly material will be indexed through Google Scholar, and hopefully, some of that material will be related to Louise Brooks.

Harold Lloyd's Hollywood Nudes in 3D

Last night at the Booksmith in San Francisco, I hosted an author event with Suzanne Lloyd, the granddaughter of silent film great Harold Lloyd. Suzanne - who was raised by her grandfather and lived with him for twenty years - spoke about Harold Lloyd's Hollywood Nudes in 3D!, a new book of photographs she edited by the comedic actor. The event was a lot of fun. Suzanne gave a brief talk, showed slides of images from the book, and took questions from the dozens of silent film and stereoscopic photography fans in the audience.

Suzanne told a story about how she came to realize Harold Lloyd was a movie star. One day in the early 1960's, she took a phone call from a man who identified himself as Cary Grant. Suzanne, who was then a young girl and unaware of her grandfather's fame, couldn't believe that the debonair actor- someone she had just seen on television - would call her home! In disbelieve, she hung up on Cary Grant. When Harold Lloyd asked who had called, Suzanne said it was someone whoclaimed to be the famous actor. It was then that Harold Lloyd explained that he too was an actor and was friendly with movie stars like Cary Grant!

Mary Pickford, Clairvoyant

What strange force led me to browse the newstand at The Booksmith in San Francisco? Was it mere coincedence, or something else? But there I found myself, drawn to something familiar, yet strange. . . 

Silent film star Mary Pickford adorns the cover of the October, 2004 issue of Fate magazine. Along with articles on strange occurances, combustible women, harmonic concordances, Russian precognition cases and the language of Sasquatches was an article entitled "Mary Pickford: Superstitious Superstar." Lina Accurso's four page piece on "America's Sweetheart" unconvincingly probes the super-rational leanings of the actress. "But what looked like a charmed life to her legions of fans had indeed been filled with sunshine, shadow, and more than a little of what she called 'superstition.' Today, this ability may be more accurately described as premonitions."

Seemingly, Mary Pickford did have an interest in the paranormal. I recently spotted a handful of books from the actress' library - each of which had some occultish theme - at Allan Milkerit books. A number of them were inscribed by the author to Mary Pickford.

Thank you Bryan Goldberg

I just recieved, through the mail, a half-dozen photocopies of rare articles about Louise Brooks. Thank you Bryan Goldberg. This dedicated Louise Brooks fan took the time to visit the Kansas State Historical Society, where he went through the Louise Brooks clippings file. (Some of this material is on-line here.) Among the material Bryan sent were clippings from the 1930's and 1950's which I had never seen before. Thank you Bryan Goldberg.

Lulu's Back in Town

Spotted this article, "Louise Brooks Lulu's Back in Town," in the on-line edition of the New York Post. (It ran on Sunday, November 14th - Louise Brooks' birthday.) The article mentions that Pandora's Box will be shown tomorrow and Saturday in New York City.

"Pandora's Box will unreel Thursday and Saturday at 9:30 p.m. at Anthology Film Archives, part of a four-day showcase called "German Cinema: Silent Into Sound." Also in the series, running Thursday through next Sunday, are two by Fritz Lang, M (1931) and Metropolis (1926), plus Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1919) and Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930). The Anthology is at Second Avenue and Second Street in the East Village; (212) 505-5181."