Photochroms Give Us Holland’s Nice, Bright Colors

Native Girls, Marken Island, HollandThe Library’s Prints and Photographs Division has added 116 photocrom travel views of the Netherlands from 100 years ago to our Flickr page, bringing the total number of photochroms on Flickr to 773.

Photochroms, published primarily from the 1890s to 1910s, are prints that were created by the Photoglob Company in Zürich, Switzerland, and the Detroit Publishing Company in Michigan. The richly colored images look like photographs but are actually ink-based photolithographs, usually 6.5 x 9 inches. You can learn more about them here.

The Library is looking toward the power of crowd-sourcing to help enhance our records about these images:

“Your addition of current place names is much appreciated! Some locations have changed names or even countries since 1900. And, the titles we had to work with from the photochrom publishers based in Detroit and Zurich tended to be English or German versions of the place names.”

(The included image, “Native girls, Marken Island, Holland,” from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalog and also online at Flickr.)

The Soundtrack of Our (Cartoon) Lives

A cartoon can be engaging and funny and tell a story without any audible sound at all; even newspaper cartoons of the 20th century featured characters such as Ferd’nand and The Little King, (external links) who went through their paces, frame-by-frame, with little or no dialogue to move the story along. But sometimes, more is more, as …

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Sesame? Sweet!

This guest post comes from Audrey Fischer of the Library’s Communications Office: Generations of former kids who learned their ABCs on PBS will be celebrating today’s 40th anniversary of the show “Sesame Street.”  (external link) The Library’s been a fan right along! In April 2000, for example, when the Library of Congress celebrated its bicentennial, …

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‘Inside Adams’ Brought Inside the Blog Fold

This feels a little like a birth announcement: The Library of Congress has launched its second official blog since the one you’re now reading took the blogosphere by storm in April 2007.  (Hyperbole much?) The Library’s Science, Technology and Business Division is an excellent addition to our growing social-media family.  The very name of the …

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Carl Reiner Webcast Now Online

Legendary comedian Carl Reiner spoke to a standing-room-only audience at the Library the other day, and I had the very good fortune of attending. I guess I should not have been surprised that this 87-year-old man was every bit as funny and incisive as he always has been.  He spun terrific yarns, was always quick …

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