Recent Articles

Harold Lloyd: The Man, The Cornball (The American Magazine, 1922)

An in-depth interview with the great silent film comedian Harold Lloyd (1893 – 1971) accompanied by a seldom seen picture of the man WITHOUT his glasses (he didn’t really need them).

One blogger read the attached article and wrote the following:

I’ve never read this before – it’s great. It’s always good to hear Harold’s own thoughts on his films; I enjoyed his description of the stunt he did in on top of the locomotive at the mouth of an approaching tunnel in the film Now or Never. It’s a spectacularly funny gag, but we sometimes forget the effort that went into these scenes; Harold was one comedy star who was prepared to suffer for his art!

Fingers Crossed for a Lasting Peace (Weekly News Review, 1953)

Fighting in Korea ended under a truce effective July 27. It is a well known fact, though, that the truce is no guarantee that fighting won’t start again. The UN wants to work out an agreement with the Reds that will mean no more war for Korea.


– and work it out they did; the truce has held for some sixty-five years. This article concerns all the various minutia both sides had to agree to in order to reach the agreement.

Virginia Woolf Reviews E.M. Forster (Atlantic Monthly, 1927)

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) had her say regarding the novels of E.M. Forster (1879 – 1970):

There are a many reasons which should prevent one from criticizing the work of contemporaries… With a novelist like E.M. Forster this is specially true, for he is in any case an author about whom there is considerable disagreement. There is something baffling and evasive in the very nature of his gifts.

General Dai Li: ”The Himmler of The East (Collier’s, 1946)

Kind words are written herein by Lt. Commander Charles G. Dobbin regarding the Himmler of the East, General Dai Li(1897 – 1946), founder of China’s secret police under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (1887 – 1975). Written in 1946, this reminiscence concerns the tight cooperation that existed between General Li’s guerrilla units and the American military (Sino-American Co-Operative Organization: S.A.C.O.) during the later years of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Dobbins emphasized how deeply General Dai Li’s intelligence operatives were able to circulate during the period in which U.S. Rear Admiral Milton Mary Miles commanded the S.A.C.O. troops.

The Basket Bags (Quick Magazines, 1952)

They clogged the shelves of every thrift shop, church bazaar and Goodwill outlet throughout all of the 70s and 80s – and during that same period costume designers used them to signify how detached and estranged a feminine antagonist was in dozens of movies and TV productions. We are referring, of course, to the basket bags of the early fifties and their heavy presence in the bric-a-brac shoppes of yore only serve to testify as to how remarkably popular they were as fashion accessories in the land of the free and home of the brave. The attached article from 1952 is illustrated with six images of the various swells of old Palm Beach clinging proudly to their wicker trophies.


(We were delighted to see that basket bags enjoyed a small come-back in the fashion world during the summer of 2017.)

Eastern European Jews Slaughtered (Current Opinion, 1920)

One of the most sinister results of the war has been a new wave of anti-Semitism in Europe. Recent dispatches from Berlin describe street demonstrations against Jews and speak of a veritable pogrom atmosphere in Munich and Budapest. In Poland, Jewish blood has flown freely, amid scenes of horror described by Herman Bernstein and other writers in American newspapers. In Ukraine the number of Jews massacred during the early part of the present year is estimated anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000.

Some of What He Said… (The Washington World, 1963)

In his speeches, messages, interviews and other papers, President Kennedy left his countrymen a large volume of eloquent words and phrases defining and illuminating the political, economic and social issues of our time… Here are some of them.

T.E. Lawrence and the Literary Coup of 1935 (Literary Digest, 1935)

The accidental death of T.E. Lawrence (1888 – 1935) triggered an event within the publishing world that was much discussed in all quarters:

THE SATURDAY REVIEW of LITERATURE, weekly guide-post for the literati, last week scooped the world with an air-tight exclusive story that was scheduled to be front page news fourteen years hence. The editorial coup was a review of Thomas Edward Lawrence’s (Lawrence of Arabia) final book, The Mintstyle=border:none, which by the terms of his will was not to be made known to the world until 1950.

A Warning to the West (Pathfinder Magazine, 1948)

This is a 1948 Soviet poster that foreign correspondents of the day reported as having been widely distributed across the Worker’s Paradise. A veiled piece of patriotic pageantry, it was clearly intended to intimidate the Western democracies; it made its appearance a few weeks into the Berlin Blockade (June, 1948 – May, 1949) – an international stunt that gained the Soviets nothing.

From Amazon:
Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalinstyle=border:none

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