Category Archives: Cool items

Welcoming 1927 to the Public Domain

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Alexis Rossi

This year we are welcoming works from 1927 into the public domain in the United States, including books, periodicals, sheet music, and movies.

Big events of 1927 include the first transatlantic phone call from New York to London, the formation of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the first successful long distance demonstration of television, the release of the first popular “talkie,” The Jazz Singer, and the first nonstop transatlantic solo airplane flight, from New York to Paris, by Charles Lindbergh.

Movies

Despite the popularity of The Jazz Singer, movies were still mostly silent in 1927, including the gorgeous Metropolis by Fritz Lang. Laurel and Hardy’s first film, Putting Pants on Phillip, was released that year, along with an early Gary Cooper Western, Nevada, Joan Crawford in Spring Fever, Mary Pickford in My Best Girl, Clara Bow in Get Your Man, and Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings.

I was particularly taken with No Man’s Land, which gives top billing to a horse (Rex the Wonder Horse, in case you were wondering – if you’d like to follow his career he also starred in The King of Wild Horses and Black Cyclone).

Or we can time travel with Koko the Clown in Koko in 1999 where they apparently thought that at the turn of the last century everything would happen via automation and you’d get a wife from a vending machine for 25 cents.

Music

No new recorded music enters the public domain in the US this year — the next group of recorded music becomes available in 4 years, due to how the music modernization act is written — but we do have some fun new sheet music to explore. The biggies that are most remembered today are probably The Best Things in Life Are Free and I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream. But you should also take some time to play Dream Kisses, The Desert Song, My Ohio Home, and Girl of My Dreams.

Periodicals

Thousands of issues of periodicals from 1927 are entering the public domain, some from titles that are still well known today like:

You may also want to check out copies of The American Girl (published by the Girl Scouts), check up on the financial markets leading up to the Great Depression in the The Financial Times, or research bling in The Jewelers Circular.

Books

The Sherlock Holmes books came to an end in 1927, and with it the release of The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan-Doyle (vol I and vol II). Other biggies include Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather and Mosquitoes by William Faulkner.

But as always, the most fun is to be had perusing the books from 1927 for hidden gems. Enjoy the gorgeous art deco designs in Ideas & studies in stencilling & decorating, for instance.

Some other fun titles include

Celebrate Public Domain Day

You can join us to celebrate public domain day two ways this year, virtually or in person.

We are having a virtual party on January 19, 2023 at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern. REGISTER FOR THE VIRTUAL EVENT HERE!

And the next day we will have an in-person Film Remix Contest Screening Party on January 20, 2023 at 6pm at 300 Funston Ave in San Francisco, to watch this year’s Public Domain Day Remix Contest winning entries. REGISTER FOR THE IN-PERSON PARTY IN SAN FRANCISCO HERE!

New additions to the Internet Archive for July 2022

Posted on August 9, 2022 by Alexis Rossi

Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to borrow certain items.

Notable new collections from our patrons:

Programming Books: Books on programming, computer languages, and development.
The Angry Corrie: Every issue of The Angry Corrie, 1991-2011

Books – 78,091 New items in July

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive – 91,636 New Items in July

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Explore.

Goose Live at Radio City Music Hall on 2022-06-24

LibriVox Audiobooks – 119 New Items in July

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 8,888 New Items in July

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Anselmi Giuseppe – Delta TQD 3047 (1907-1909)

D’ Assy Pierre – Discophilia DIS 376 (1908-09)

Live Music Archive – 965 New Items in July

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission). Explore.

Movies – 135 New Items in July

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

We Can Rebuild It: Using the Internet Archive to Discover Original Order

Posted on June 7, 2022 by Lori Donovan

Guest post by: Amanda Hill, Archivist of the Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County, a member of the Community Webs program and a contributor to the Internet Archive.

One of the things archivists get excited about is the importance of ‘original order’. This is the idea that the arrangement of records by their creator has significance to our understanding of the records themselves. Wherever possible, archivists will try to determine the original order of materials in their care.

An item received at the Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County in 2015 presented something of a puzzle in this respect. It was a scrapbook from the First World War, of newspaper clippings and other memorabilia which had been pasted into a printed book. The binding of the book had partially come apart and the early pages of the scrapbook had been jumbled into no particular order, with clippings dated 1917 mixed in with those from 1916.

Examination of the scrapbook revealed that its owner was Alice Deacon, born in Belleville, Ontario, on September 27th, 1899. She was the child of Daniel Deacon and his wife, Catherine Dugan. During the First World War, the Deacons were living at 107 Station Street, Belleville. They were Roman Catholics and Alice was probably a student at St. Michael’s Academy on Church Street.

Alice had three older brothers: James, Frederick and Francis (Frank). Frank joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force on March 23rd, 1916 in Belleville and it may have been this event which triggered Alice’s interest in the war. Frank’s service record is available from Library and Archives Canada.

The scrapbook mainly comprises cuttings from The Daily Intelligencer newspaper during the war, where Alice carefully recorded references to Belleville boys overseas, sometimes annotating the clippings with her own observations about whether a man had returned from the front, or which school he had attended.

Alongside the newspaper extracts are other more personal items, such as postcards, theatre programs, calling cards, invitations and ticket stubs. This page illustrates some of the variety:

Here we find an invitation, two pressed flowers “from ruins of a French village, May 1917” and a picture “off a box of chocolates Jim gave me for my birthday, 1916.”

Alice did not begin with blank pages: she used a copy of Richardson’s New Method for the Piano-Forte, originally published in 1859 by Nathan Richardson. In between Alice’s pastings, we can see parts of the text of the underlying book. Some of the pages still had visible page numbers, although most did not, but the majority had at least some legible words and phrases. This was the key to re-creating Alice’s original order.

We discovered that the Richardson book had been digitized by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was available online through the Internet Archive.

This digital copy proved essential in discovering the original order of the scrapbook. Using the Internet Archive’s searching facility, we were able to locate the identifiable words and match them to the page numbers of the original book. Once all the pages were identified, it was a simple matter to put them back into the order they would have been in when the book was intact.

Alice’s brother Frank came home safely from the war and was demobilized on May 23rd, 1919. Alice worked as a stenographer and bookkeeper in Belleville until 1929, when she married Leo Houlihan in St. Michael’s Church. She then left Belleville to live with Leo in Lindsay, Ontario. She died in 1955 and was buried in the Our Lady of Mercy Roman Catholic cemetery in Sarnia, Ontario.

Her scrapbook arrived back in Belleville by mail, sixty years after Alice’s death. Thanks are due to the anonymous donor for sharing this glimpse into a young woman’s wartime life, and also to our colleagues at the University of North Carolina and the Internet Archive for making it possible to reconstruct the scrapbook as it was when Alice first created it.

We have mainly been sharing our newspaper collection at the Internet Archive, but once it was digitized, we felt compelled to share Alice’s scrapbook there, too!

New additions to the Internet Archive for May 2022

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Alexis Rossi

Notable new collections from our patrons:

Bandwagon: The Journal of the Circus Historical Society
Console Living Room: Atari Lynx
U.S. Senate – A collection of hearing videos across all committees from the United States Senate.
CDi Collection – A collection of CDi (Interactive CD-ROM) CD-ROMs from the 1990s and 2000s.

Books – 52,300 New items in May

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

100 things you should know about prehistoric life

Audio Archive – 89,325 New Items in May

Goose Live at Westville, Music Bowl on 2022-05-28

LibriVox Audiobooks – 92 New Items in May

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 112 New Items in May

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Scampini Augusto – Verdi (Gram. Concert) GC 2 52615-6) 1907

Live Music Archive – 807 New Items in May

Circles Around The Sun Live at Wonder Bar on 2022-05-18

Netlabels – 223 New Items in May

This collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of ‘virtual record labels’. These ‘netlabels’ are non-profit, community-built entities dedicated to providing high quality, non-commercial, freely distributable MP3/OGG-format music for online download in a multitude of genres. Explore.

Movies – 110 New Items in May

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

New additions to the Internet Archive for April 2022

Posted on May 7, 2022 by Alexis Rossi

Notable new collections from our patrons:

Chris Cromwell Rare Reel to Reel Tapes – Rare and recovered reel-to-reel tapes from a variety of sources and preserved by Chris Cromwell.
1940s Classic TV – Television from the 1940s.
Game Shows Archive – A collection of game shows throughout television history, involving chance, skill and luck, usually presided over by a host and providing in-show commercials.
Dutch Television – Television programs and videos in the Dutch language, or from the Netherlands.

Books – 50,109 New items in April

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Zebra mussels and aquatic nuisance species

Audio Archive – 150,224 New Items in April

Cabinet Live at Sherman Theater on 2022-04-01

LibriVox Audiobooks – 99 New Items in April

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 6,745 New Items in April

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Live Music Archive – 909 New Items in April

The Wolf Tones Live at the Thunderbird Café Porch Stage on 2022-04-26

Netlabels – 111 New Items in April

Movies – 55 New Items in April

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

New additions to the Internet Archive for March 2022

Posted on April 7, 2022 by Alexis Rossi

Notable new collections from our patrons:

Cleveland Museum of Art Lesson Plans – lesson plans produced by the Cleveland Museum of Art between approximately 2000 and 2013.
Type, Typewriter and Typography Catalogs – Catalogs related to typefaces, typesetting, fonts and typewriters.
Miscellaneous Punk Zines – Magazines described as part of Punk music and culture.
Avontuur Classics – (Dutch Language) comics of adventure and science fiction.

Books – 60,379 New items in March

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive – 93,954 New Items in March

LibriVox Audiobooks – 122 New Items in March

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 7,423 New Items in March

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Culbertson Sasha – Aeolian Vocalion D 02143 1923

Live Music Archive – 1,098 New Items in March

Netlabels – 186 New Items in March

Movies – 25 New Items in March

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

What’s New in February 2022

Posted on March 4, 2022 by Alexis Rossi

Here are some of the notable new additions to the Internet Archive from February 2022. (Logging in might be required to borrow certain items.)

Notable new collections:

We’ve been reorganizing some of the items uploaded by our users, and these collections of magazines struck us as particularly interesting:

The Planetary Report: 216 issues of a scientific magazine all about planets.
Film and Cinema Magazines: Magazines dealing with film, movies, cinema and related subjects, including film making.
Hobby Magazines: Magazines dedicated to hobbies.

Books 45,073

This month we’ve added books in more than 20 languages. Here are a few good ones to start with:

Audio Archive 73,305

The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection 118

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audio versions of public domain texts: poetry, short stories, whole books, even dramatic works, in many different languages.

A Guide Book of Art, Architecture, and Historic Interests in Pennsylvania

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings 8,840

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century.

Live Music Archive 892

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming.

Billy Strings Live at Bell Auditorium on 2022-02-16

Netlabels 263

The Netlabels collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of virtual record labels.

Internet Arcade 5

The Internet Arcade is a web-based library of arcade (coin-operated) video games from the 1970s through to the 1990s, emulated in JSMAME, part of the JSMESS software package. Containing hundreds of games ranging through many different genres and styles, the Arcade provides research, comparison, and entertainment in the realm of the Video Game Arcade.

New additions to the Internet Archive for January 2022

Posted on February 3, 2022 by Alexis Rossi

Notable new collections:

Shakemore Festival (2007-present) Maryland: The Shakemore Music Festival is an annual weekend event comprised of 20 to 30 acts, featuring frequent appearances from what has become a large Shakemore family of bands (including Bang Bang Lulu, Caching Behavior, Cigarbox Planetarium, Go Pills, Weird Paul Rock Band, and many others).
Quantum Leap Podcast: The Quantum Leap Podcast talks about every episode of the cult hit time travel program, as well as the novels and comic books it inspired.
My Morton Grove – Oral History Interviews: A collection of oral history interviews conducted by Morton Grove Public Library in Morton Grove, Illinois.

Books 40,695

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive 79,099

The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection 98

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings 6,849

The Great 78 Project! Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century.

Leavin’ Tonight
by
Jesse Powell Orchestra

Live Music Archive 799

Greensky Bluegrass Live at The Flynn Theatre on 2022-01-26
by Greensky Bluegrass

Netlabels 486

Welcoming Recorded Music to the Public Domain

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Alexis Rossi

Every January we feature works that are entering the public domain. And this year the big story is in recorded music.

Recorded Music from 1922 and earlier

Approximately 400,000 sound recordings made before 1923 will join the public domain in the U.S. for the first time due to the Music Modernization Act (read more at copyright.gov). You can peruse about 38,000 of them in our collection of digitized 78rpm records.

By 1922 we were solidly in the Jazz Age – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age was published in 1922, and the term was already in popular usage. Jazz migrated from Black American communities in New Orleans into the rest of the United States, having evolved from its roots in rag time, blues and Creole music. In fact, 1922 was the year Louis Armstrong left New Orleans to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago.

Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1911) written by Irving Berlin and performed by Collins and Harlan

Peruse the collection to hear early jazz classics like Don’t Care Blues by Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds, Ory’s Creole Trombone by Kid Ory’s Sunshine Orchestra, and Jazzin’ Babies Blues by Ethel Waters.

Early recordings by Bert Williams (the first Black American on Broadway and the first Black man to star in a film), Fanny Brice (the real-life ‘Funny Girl’), Enrico Caruso (the legendary Italian operatic tenor), and so many others give life and flavor to our imaginings of the early 20th century.

Here are some of the top songs from 1922, to give you a taste:

April Showers by Al Jolson
Hot Lips by Paul Whiteman
‘Way Down Yonder in New Orleans by Margaret Young
The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise by Isham Jones Orchestra
Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Goo’bye) by Al Jolson
Mister Gallagher and Mister Shean
Ory’s Creole Trombone by Kid Ory’s Sunshine Orchestra
My Buddy by Henry Burr
Oh! Is She Dumb by Eddie Cantor
Three O’Clock in the Morning by Paul Whiteman
On The Alamo by Isham Jones

But personally when I “flip through” these records I’m always drawn to the novelty songs.

There’s a whole genre of sound imitations, like Violin Mimicry where a violin is used to imitate people talking, Jingles from the Marsh Birds with a man imitating birds imitating popular songs (just as confusing as it sounds), and A Cat-astrophe with people imitating rather catastrophic cats to music.

You can also skip the jokes and go straight to laughing just for the sake of it with these gems: Laughs You Have Met, Gennett Laughing Record, and The Okeh Laughing Record, or choose to have a little music with laughing choruses like Ticklish Reuben, She Gives Them All the Ha-Ha-Ha, Stop Your Tickling, Jock! or And Then I Laughed.

And perhaps my favorite of the bunch is Fido is a Hot Dog Now which seems to be about a dog who is definitely going to hell.

Fido is a Hot Dog Now (1914) by Billy Murray

Other Media from 1926

As usual, we are also welcoming some new books, movies, journals, and sheet music – this time from 1926! (Read about 1925, 1924, and 1923 in previous posts.)

Some popular first edition books from 1926:

The Land of Mist by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather
Soldiers’ Pay by William Faulkner
The Romantic Comedians by Ellen Glasgow
The World of William Clissold by H.G. Wells
Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Clothes We Wear (1926) by Frank and Frances Carpenter

Other interesting books from 1926 that you might want to explore include Show Boat by Edna Ferber which was made into the musical Show Boat in 1927 with music by Jerome Kern, The Clothes We Wear by Frank and Frances Carpenter which is a child friendly exploration of how clothes are made all the way from the field through weaving and into sewing, or The Art of Kissing by Clement Wood which is pretty self explanatory.

We invite you to explore some of the other items dated 1926 in our collections to find your own fun items that may now be in the public domain.

Virtual Party for the Public Domain

Please join us for a virtual party on January 20, 2022 at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern time with a keynote from Senator Ron Wyden, champion of the Music Modernization Act and a bunch of musical acts, dancers, historians, librarians, academics, activists and other leaders from the Open world! (And yes, we DO have a book from 1926 about how to throw the world’s best party.)

Event on January 20th, 2022

January 1st brings public domain riches from 1925

Posted on December 15, 2020 by Alexis Rossi

On January 1st, 2021, many books, movies and other media from 1925 will enter the public domain in the United States. Some of them are quite famous — jump ahead to see lists of those well known books and movies that you can enjoy on the Internet Archive — or take the scenic route with me.

Book cover: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

What does this all mean? Essentially, many items created in 1925 in the US that are still under copyright will become free and open for people to use in any way they see fit in the new year. But check out Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain article for a more in-depth explanation.

We have a party every year to celebrate the new works entering the public domain, and this year is no exception. Join us on Thursday, Dec. 17th to toast these newly available additions.

Traveling from Home

As part of this yearly ritual, I explore our collections to unearth these newly freed items, and I invariably run across a few things that hit a nerve. This year, it started with this intertitle in “Isn’t Life Terrible?” Less than 20 seconds into this 1925 film, and suddenly I’m dumped back into 2020.

Silent film intertitle that reads, "Charley Chase as The poor young man with only two places to go -- Front yard and back yard"

Rude, right? I don’t even have a front yard to enjoy during shelter in place.

But the magic of media is that it can transport us to different places and times. Photo books like Picturesque Italy, Picturesque Mexico, and Picturesque Palestine, Arabia and Syria show us both how much and how little has changed in the past 95 years.

Screen shot thumbnail images from the book Picturesque Italy. The 12+ photos feature tourist sites in Venice, Italy like the Doges Palace, the Bridge of Sighs, and Piazza San Marco.

Gondolas still glide under the Bridge of Sighs, and the Tower of Pisa is still leaning, but the 1925 version of the Colosseum certainly lacks today’s fake gladiator photo ops.

Looking at the past with the eyes of today

Every toe dipped into the past has the potential to surprise or shock. The story of a pantry shelf, an outline history of grocery specialties is only mildly interesting on the surface. Essentially, it’s a sales pitch to food manufacturers encouraging them to advertise in a set of women’s magazines. The book contains short case histories of successful food brands like Maxwell House Coffee, Campbell Soup, Coca Cola, etc. (all of whom advertise with them, naturally).

The book gives you a glimpse of why people were so enthusiastic about mass produced, packaged foods. Unsanitary conditions, bugs in your sugar, milk going bad over night; things modern shoppers never think about.

It puts this glowing praise of Kraft Cheese into perspective: “…a pasteurized product, blended to obtain a uniformity of quality and flavor, a thing greatly lacking in ordinary types of cheese.” (page 149)

That’s pretty entertaining if you’re a cheese lover. I think most people would agree that Kraft cheese is no longer on the cutting edge.

But keep poking around and you find a much deeper cultural divergence. While The story of a pantry shelf is extolling the virtues of the home economics training available at Cornell, you stumble across this horrifying sentence (page 12).

Passage from "The Story of a Pantry Shelf" which reads, "Indeed, the Practice House, where students learn housekeeping in its every phase, even includes the complete care of a baby, adopted each year by Cornell for the benefit of these 'mothers' who, under the direction of trained Home Economics women, feed, bathe, dress and tend an infant from the tender age of two weeks throughout the session."

I was not expecting to read about orphaned babies being used as “learning aids” while flipping through stories about Jell-O. Intellectually, I know that attitudes towards children have changed over the years — the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set federal standards for child labor, wasn’t even passed until 1938. But this casual aside tossed in amongst the marketing hype still packs an emotional punch. It’s important to remember how far we have come.

Even writing that was forward-thinking for the time, like the booklet Homo-sexual life, is terribly backward according to today’s standards. It’s from the Little Blue Book series — we have many that were published in 1925, and the publisher was quite prolific for many years. The series provided working class people with inexpensive access to all kinds of topics including philosophy, sexuality, science, religion, law, and government. Post WWII, they published criticism of J. Edgar Hoover and the founder was subsequently targeted by the FBI for tax evasion. But in 1925, they were going strong and one of their prolific writers was Clarence Darrow.

Controversies of the Age

Darrow was writing about prohibition for the Little Blue Book series in 1925, but that is also the year he defended John T. Scopes for teaching evolution in his Tennessee classroom. The Scopes Trial generated a huge amount of publicity, pitting religion against science, and even giving rise to popular songs like these two 78rpm recordings from 1925.

The John T. Scopes Trial (The Old Religion’s Better After All) by Vernon Dalhart and Company

Monkey Biz-ness (Down in Tennessee) by International Novelty Orchestra with Billy Murray

Like the Scopes trial, prohibition had its passionate adherents and detractors. This was the “Roaring 20s” — the year The Great Gatsby was published — with speakeasies and flappers and iconic cocktails. And yet the pro-prohibition silent film Episodes in the Life of a Gin Bottle follows a bottle around as it lures people into a state of dissolution.

We even see an entire book about throwing parties that includes no alcoholic beverages at all.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

But as much as some things have changed, other aspects of our lives remain unchanged. People still want to tell you about their pets, rely on self help books, read stories to their kids, follow celebrities, tell each other jokes, and make silly videos.

And the most unchanging part of this particular season, of course — children still anticipate the arrival of Santa Claus with questions, wishes and schemes.

The silent film Santa Claus features two children who want to know where Saint Nick lives and how he spends his time. We follow him to the North Pole (Alaska in disguise) to see Santa’s workshop, snow castle, reindeer, and friends and neighbors. Jack Frost, introduced around 14:20, appears to be wearing the prototype for Ralphie’s bunny suit in “A Christmas Story” (but with a magic wand). Stick around for the sleigh crash at 20:45, and right around 22:20 Santa wipes out on the ice.

And just in case you’re still doing your holiday shopping, I feel like I should pass on a recommendation from this ad in a 1925 The Billboard magazine: Armadillo Baskets make beautiful Christmas gifts. And you can still buy vintage versions online – trust me, I looked. You’re welcome.

Advertisement with a picture of an armadillo and a basket made from an armadillo. Text reads, "Armadillo Baskets Make Beautiful Christmas Gifts. From these nine-banded horn-shelled little animals we make beautiful baskets. We are the original dealers in Armadillo Baskets. We take their shells, polish them, and then line with silk. They make ideal work baskets, etc. Let us tell you about these unique baskets. Write for Free Booklet. Apelt Armadillo Co., Comfort, Texas."

The Famous Stuff

And now on to the blockbusters of 1925…

Books First Published in 1925

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Der Prozess by Franz Kafka (The trial in English)
The professor’s house by Willa Cather
No more parades by Ford Madox Ford
The Thundering Herd by Zane Grey
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
The mother’s recompense by Edith Wharton
The writing of fiction by Edith Wharton
Christina Alberta’s father by H. G. Wells
A year of prophesying by H. G. Wells
Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso
Manhattan transfer John Dos Passos
Porgy by DuBose Heyward (became Porgy & Bess in 1935)
Gentlemen prefer blondes by Anita Loos

Movies Released in 1925

The Big parade
The Freshman (Harold Lloyd)
The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin)
The Lost World
Don Q Son of Zorro (douglas fairbanks)
Little Annie Rooney (mary pickford)
The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney)
The Unholy Three (Lon Chaney)
Ben Hur (Ramon Novarro)
Curses (Fatty Arbuckle)
The Eagle (Rudolph Valentino)
Go West (Buster Keaton)
The Lady (Norma Talmadge)
The Monster (Lon Chaney)
The Plastic Age (Clara Bow)
Seven Chances (Buster Keaton)
The Wizard of Oz (Oliver Hardy)
Lady of the Night (Norma Shearer)