Ricky Lee Grove

 I love watching old cartoons. There's just such a sense of fun in them. They are all forgotten now, except for those studying animation. It's a shame, because these short cartoons were well-crafted, funny, and very creative. So when I came across a collection of cartoons from 1929 at archive.org, I was so delighted. My favorite cartoon of the 16 featured in the archive is "When the Cats Away".  When the Cat’s Away is a 1929 Walt Disney Mickey Mouse short that stands out because Mickey and Minnie are shown as actual mice rather than the familiar cartoon-sized characters. It was released on May 3, 1929, and is generally treated as the sixth Mickey Mouse cartoon. The film was directed by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks and Ben Sharpsteen. It was a loose remake of Disney’s earlier 1925 silent short Alice Rattled by Rats, which helps explain why its character setup feels a little unusual compared with later Mickey cartoons

  The cover art for the iconic Dover Publications editions of  Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu  often utilizes 19th-century archival illustrations rather than contemporary commissions. The covers were designed by the company’s legendary editor and scholar,  E.F. Bleiler . He often selected the specific archival woodcuts and period artwork used for these covers to ensure they captured the "shudder-filled" atmosphere of Le Fanu’s prose. The specific illustration on the cover of Guy Deverell is a wood engraving, but there is no credit for the artist (often the case with many publishers printing public domain novels). It is appropriately creepy because of the objects (old church, dead tree, crow), but the colorization is excellent. I’m sure the original image was black and white. If Bleiler designed the cover, he chose swaths of blue, great and amber which come together to suggest the “sensational” quality of the story. Another excellent cover in the Dover Sheridan Le Fanu repri...

Archive.org has a great library of LP/vinyl recordings. While browsing through the library, I came across the personal collection of Donald R. Snow , which was donated to the archive by his family. There are 182 vinyl records in the collection, primarily jazz and pop. One of my favorites is George Cates's Polynesian Percussion It was released in 1961 and has 12 great tracks of what I call Tiki music. Here is the album cover and  an embedded audio player for the whole album T  

  Early in the paperback revolution (started in 1939), Pocket Books decided to try a paperback book vending machine. 50 paperback books for a quarter each. It was an interesting idea, but it failed in the end because readers wanted to actually handle and look at the books they were buying. Unlike candy or coffee, which is uniform in content, books vary by plot, genre and cover art.  According to this article , two years after the first Book-O-Mat was released, an updated version was created by Rock Ola, a company that specialized in slot machines and juke boxes. Apparently, it failed as well. However, it looked like a much better design than the original, since you could actually see the covers of the paperbacks

More info on this remarkable duo here

Dimension X was a groundbreaking science fiction anthology series that aired on NBC from April 8, 1950, to September 29, 1951. It is celebrated as one of the first radio programs to treat science fiction as a serious, adult-oriented genre rather than "juvenile" space adventures like Buck Rogers . Format : Half-hour episodes featuring standalone stories of futuristic technology, space exploration, and time travel. Narrator : The series was famously opened by Norman Rose , whose deep voice intoned: "Adventures in time and space, told in future tense... Dimension X!" over a haunting echo and a slow-pounding bass drum. Authors : The show gained instant credibility by adapting stories from the era's leading sci-fi writers, including Ray Bradbury , Isaac Asimov , Robert Heinlein , Kurt Vonnegut , and Robert Bloch . Successor : It was the direct precursor to the even more famous series X Minus One (1955–1958), which recycled many of the same scripts and actors. Not...