Here’s my favorite holiday story, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, beautifully illustrated by Arthur Rackham and presented and preserved in several formats by the Internet Archive.

And if you’d rather listen to the book, I recommend the Librivox A Christmas Carol version 2, read by Glen Hallstrom, otherwise known as “Smokestack Jones.” You can download the files in many formats from the Librivox page for this audiobook, or download or listen online at its Internet Archive page. Librivox recordings are free audiobooks of public domain titles, read by volunteers.

A Christmas Carol, Illustrated by Arthur Rackham

Embedded from the Internet Archive

A Christmas Carol, Read by Glen Hallstrom

Embedded from the Internet Archive.

“Grandpa’s Christmas Visit” was broadcast on December 22, 1955, during the show’s second season. Grandpa Collins comes from Joplin, Missouri, to visit Bob, Margaret and Chuck. He looks an awful lot like an older version of Bob, and has the same way with the girls, and, as you might imagine, much merriment ensues…

Grandpa’s Christmas Visit from the Internet Archive:

I love roaming around through the amazing collection of public domain books on the Internet Archive, but there’s no good way to search just the illustrations within the books. I have been copying some of the images and posting them to Flickr, linking back to the Internet Archive book record both as a credit and for more information.

Right now I am working with James Arthur Ambler’s Worcester Illustrated from 1875, which has lots of pictures of commercial buildings, factories and more. The size and quality of my images vary as I experiment with using different versions of the Internet Archive files and different ways to make copies. I’m also fooling around with the files a bit, straightening and cropping them, doing minor color correction and adding borders. I’m not very good at this, but I’m not going to worry about it. I feel like I am making these images more findable and more shareable, and that even at their worst they are way better than noting.

I am putting these in a Flickr set called Worcester History Images along with some of my scanned old Worcester postcards. When I have time, I’d like to get these into a real database, put them on a Google map, do some then-and-now photographs, etc. But right now, I just want to get these out there so they can be search and found, so someone might find a picture of the factory where his great grandfather worked, or the school his great-great-grandmother attended.

In Flanders Field
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)

When I was a child, my parents had an old recording of this song and I loved it’s rousing, patriotic cheerfulness, sending the boys off to the War to End All Wars. But in school my teacher recited In Flanders Field to the class, and I found the middle verse chilling: “We are the dead. Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow…” I still do, and think of it every time I read more young men and women going off to war and dying.

Over There, by George M. Cohan, sung by Arthur Fields, Columbia A2470, recorded in 1917, from the 78RPM Collection on the Internet Archive

This ten minute black-and-white film was made for the Chevrolet Division, General Motors Corporation, and is one of several Jam Handy productions from the Prelinger Archives available through the Internet Archive.

On the Air — Internet Archive

As the narrator says, “Yes, it’s swell teamwork on the part of everyone that gets speedy, accurate information for modern roadmaps!”

This film was produced by the Jam Handy Organization, known for its stylish and imaginative training and promotional films produced for the armed forces, the automotive industry and other industrial clients. Caught Mapping was sponsored by Chevrolet, and not surprisingly there are lots of great shots of modern, reliable automobiles handling all sorts of road conditions, and running smoothly enough to allow the passenger to be taking legible notes. There are also a few shots near the beginning of the motoring public consulting road maps. I particularly like the two young women wearing their glamorous hats, one of which looks like a big feather was shot straight through it.

The film runs a little less than ten minutes and is an interesting and informative look at the ways street maps were maintained in the days before GIS, GPS, satellite imagery, Google Maps and Google Earth! I wonder if fifty years from now, people will be looking back at the primitive processes Google is using to gather the imagery for Streetview, which is not unlike the road warriors driving around to personally check every inch of road.

Caught Mapping — View the video on the Internet Archive site, with more information and different video formats to download.

Back of the Mike (1938) shows a young boy listening to the latest episode in an adventure radio program. Old Pete Belden and his niece Betty are driving the Flying B payroll across the desert when they are attacked by bandits, complete with cowboy hats and bandanas!

At first we see the story as if it were a movie, and we see the scenes that the boy is seeing in his mind. Then the view switches, and we’re in the radio studio, where we see the actors reading from their scripts and the sound effects men producing the sounds of horse hooves, cars, doors, fire, gunshots and more. The film keeps switching, showing us the boy in his bedroom, the Western scenes in his head, and the smooth operation of the radio study producing this fantasy.

This film is a great look at how radio dramas were made. I’ve seen other behind-the-scenes looks at old time radio studios in action, but I thought this one was particularly effective, contrasting the drama produced by the imagination of the listener with what’s really happening in the studio.

Back of the Mike was produced by the Jam Handy Organization, a Detroit-based company run by Henry Jamison “Jam” Handy. Jam Handy produced hundreds of short educational and industrial films. This is one of many in the Prelinger Archives available through the Internet Archive site.

Back of the Mike (1938)