Spotting old books and magazines and dummy newspapers in TV, movies and old photos

[Victoria Silverwolf]

From First Man Into Space (1959):

The secondary headlines are an odd mixture. There are the usual vague ones that show up in fake newspapers ("Farmers Expect Bumper Crops") along with the dramatic ones about fires and floods, as well as strange ones like "Boxer was Short of Money" and "the Drama of Peace." Note the tiny print for "Family of Three Die in Crash" as opposed to the larger print of the very similar "Man in Crash." Most eccentric of all, I think, is "Clippie Nancy May be 'Sent to Coventry'".

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

From Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre (1977)

Do newspapers really ever use huge typeface to announce that a crime has not been solved yet?

 

[Bick]

From Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre (1977)
Do newspapers really ever use huge typeface to announce that a crime has not been solved yet?

No - good point!

 

[CupofJoe]

In the UK you might, if a paper has taken up a cause. The disappearance of a young child, Madeleine McCann, has lead papers to run with "Police no closer to finding killer" type headlines for the last 5 years [on and off].

 

[Extollager]

Victoria, that's probably the least convincing dummy newspaper I've seen. : )

 

[Extollager]

A few books spotted from the final Inspector Morse teleplay, "The Remorseful Day." This is Thorntons bookshop in Oxford -- the little strip of white paper above the Concise DNBs (see photo in next posting) gives their online address. In this picture one can see Babar's Travels to the far right. By the man's left arm, the book with buildings and a blue sky is Taliesin and Taliesin West. There are multiple books with the title Not Fade Away -- which one is this?

 

[Extollager]

Here one can see that the greenish looking thick hardcover books are the Concise Dictionary of National Biography. We also see the slipcased Folio Society edition of F. M. Bailey's Mission to Tashkent.

 

[Extollager]

Finally, from "The Remorseful Day," a few identifiable books in addition to the one displayed in the young man's hands. David Attenborough's Life on Earth. Near the right of the image, Hemingway's True at First Light is next to the book with Hemingway easily visible. That one looks like it would be a book in the Blackwell Critical Biographies series edited by Claude Rawson, but I didn't find an image that would confirm that. On the other side of True at First Light, bold red letters spell out HEM ING WAY, I'm sure, but which book about him this is I don't know. City Safari appears to be the title of one of the books, but I couldn't find it and got tired of looking at photos of other books with "safari" as a key word.

 

[hitmouse]

Thornton's has now shut. In its place is a Harry Potter-themed shop, one of several in Oxford city centre. It is quite normal to see tourists wondering around the city in HP robes, scarves, wands etc, possibly on a HP-themed guided tour. I expect the Brideshead Revisited tours are going out of fashion. As if the place is not fantastic enough already. Mind you, watching the hordes of package visitors being shunted round places like Oxford ("See the whole of the UK in 5 days! Buckingham Palace, Oxford, Stonehenge, Stratford-on-Avon, Edinburgh, and finish with an authentic medieval banquet!") has always been quite interesting.
But I digress.

 

[Extollager]

Here's what that Not Fade Away book looked like, in the first photo of the three (#266 above).

 

[Extollager]

The Inspector Morse teleplay "The Settling of the Sun" gives us glimpses of Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils, V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, and John Fowles's A Maggot.

The Morse teleplay "Last Bus to Woodstock" has more books you can easily identify than perhaps any of the others in the series. The poetry of Robert Herrick isn't important as a source of actual clues, but fits a theme of love, lust, consequences, etc. We see Keith Walker's The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Graham Green's Lord Rochester's Monkey on a table. Morse picks up a copy of The Debt to Pleasure: John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester by John Adlard.

 

[Extollager]

In “Last Bus,” we see some other books of interest.

Spenser's Faerie Queene in a Penguin English Poets paperback. The young lady started out not liking Spenser and then did like him, as well she might!

The Penguins are Malory's Morte D'Arthur (Vol. 1 of the Caxton edition) and English Mystery Plays. I suppose the others are legible enough but in case the photo disappears, as seems to happen sometime, we have A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, C. S. Lewis's Allegory of Love, three volumes of Skeat's edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. There's also a glimpse of a TLS issue. Almost a still life. (I don't say a great one!)

 

[dask]

Wonder how Oxford defines short?

 

[hitmouse]

Wonder how Oxford defines short?

I have a more modern edition of that dictionary. 2 solid volumes with very detailed etymologies and references. The full dictionary is 20 volumes. There is a used set for sale on eBay for £499 (+p&p). “Short” is relative in this case.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I have a 1973 copy of that dictionary. Each volume is over 2000 pages and each page reproduces four pages of the 1933(?) OED. The typeface is incredibly small and even well sighted people need a magnifying glass to read it. I think it was originally sold in a slip case with one.

 

[dask]

Not sure this is from a movie, a movie set perhaps, indulging in a little cerebral stimulation before for the director calls for action.

 

[Bick]

Not sure this is from a movie, a movie set perhaps, indulging in a little cerebral stimulation before for the director calls for action.

Very few readers get that far through Ulysses! A set up for an actual shot, I suspect.

 

[Extollager]

Looks like it's the 1961 Modern Library edition.

 

[Bick]

It's actually from a 1955 photoshoot, not a movie at all:

During the 1950s, the pioneering photojournalist Eve Arnold took a series of portraits of Marilyn Monroe. The now iconic photos generally present Monroe as a larger-than-life celebrity and sex symbol. Except for one. In 1955, Arnold photographed Monroe reading a worn copy of James Joyce’s modernist classic, Ulysses. It’s still debated whether this was simply an attempt to recast her image (she often played the “dumb blonde” character in her ’50s films), or whether she actually had a pensive side. (Her personal library, catalogued at the time of her death, suggests the latter.) But, either way, Arnold explained years later how this memorable photo came about:
We worked on a beach on Long Island. She was visiting Norman Rosten the poet…. I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it — but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her. It was always a collaborative effort of photographer and subject where she was concerned — but almost more her input.

There are actually a lot of photos of Marilyn reading books - she was quite the bibliophile by all accounts.

 

[dask]

I apologize if this has already been posted. From The Green Mile I think: