A little while back, I posted about an online archive of jazz LPs. I was thrilled to come across a similar collection of classical record sleeves. Love it.

Check out Vintage Vanguard‘s great online archive of record sleeves for albums by various jazz musicians. Nice use of color, image placement and typography in some of these LPs.

In case you were wondering, “ジャズレコード館” translates from Japanese to English as “Jazz Record Mansion.”

48 Photos of women on TV taken late at night by a lonely photographer in 1957. Encrusted with 50 year old dust and emulsion the photos of women from melodramas and late-night talk shows are not only a record of one person’s peculiar obsession but also a virtual catalog of the kind of roles women played in the popular entertainment of the era.

Constance Powling, 1957 (front)
© Unknown Photographer

Constance Powling, 1957 (back)
© Unknown Photographer

Very interesting and really sort of heart breaking. See more images here.

Many of you know that Andy Adams is the editor behind the daily photography blogzine Flak Photo. What many of you might not know, however, is that Andy also has done work for the photographs department of the Wisconsin Historical Society, as a staff member in their digital lab. There he worked to make high resolution scans of vintage photographic negatives and prints from the collections and process the files for digital and print output.

Andy e-mailed me to let me know that the WHS has been putting scans of these old negatives and prints up on Flickr.

One of the sets that’s particularly special to see is the set of Wisconsin Death Trip images. It includes a selection of photographs produced by Charles Van Schaick between 1890 and 1910 that were later used in the book by Michael Lesy (1973). The entirety of the Charles Van Schaick collection (around 5,600 glass plates) is housed in the archives of the WHS.

The WHS is currently in the process of mounting the entire collection on their website. See the Van Schaick images there or, as mentioned, visit the Flickr set for a smaller selection. There really are too many stunning images to count.

Thank you for passing this on, Andy.

I’m not sure where I saw this first, so I’ll just link to the original source. Things Magazine presents the Pelican Project – an archive of covers of Pelican (now Penguin) books from the 1930s to the 1980s.

What a great image of the evolution of graphic design and typography. And it’s interesting to see the visual unity within each of the decades.

The ’70s were golden.

Shorpy is the “100-year-old photo blog” named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a young “greaser” on Bessie Mine of the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Co. in Alabama (photographed by Lewis Hine late in 1910).

If you found yourself enjoying Alec‘s Jump The Sandwich shenanigans, you may also enjoy the many wonders of Specific Things. I’d love to highlight all of the “specific things” that the website features but, well, that’s what the site’s for.

Alas, here are a few samples from two of the collections:

Teams Called The Pirates

(from “Teams Called the Pirates”)
© Unknown / Specific Things

(from “Teams Called the Pirates”)
© Unknown / Specific Things

(from “Teams Called the Pirates”)
© Unknown / Specific Things

(from “Teams Called the Pirates”)
© Unknown / Specific Things

Dogpiles

(from “Dogpiles”)
© Unknown / Specific Things

(from “Dogpiles”)
© Unknown / Specific Things

(from “Dogpiles”)
© Unknown / Specific Things

(from “Dogpiles”)
© Unknown / Specific Things

Lots more where that came from on the website.

I should also add that Specific Things is looking for photographic submissions in the following categories:

Pictures of TP’d houses
Pictures of people imitating statues they are posing in front of
People giving the thumbs-up wearing yellow rain slickers
Pictures of people toasting at holiday dinners
Young men wearing “pimp” costumes
Self-portraits taken on roller coasters
Pictures of people who have had pies thrown at them
Pictures of people waiting in long lines

AMP reminds us that, as surfers of the interweb, we have FREE digital access to the entire Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog.

Instead of Phoogling, maybe we could do some Phlibrary-of-congressing? Just a thought.

Search the catalog here. Also worth pointing out is that you can access high resolution TIFF files of most all of the images, which you can then make your own digital prints from. Alternately, if you’d prefer you can purchase actual prints of your favorites for as littles as $25 for an 8″ x 10″. Incredible.