The Library‘s Serial and Government Publications Division is home to one of the most extensive newspaper collections in the world. Included in the collection is the original editorial by Francis P. Church of The New York Sun, explaining to a young girl who wrote into the paper inquiring about whether or not Santa is real.
The full text of the editorial (printed September 21, 1897) is below:
Is There a Santa Claus?
We take pleasure in answering at once and thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:
"Dear Editor: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says: “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus? Virginia O'Hanlon 115 West Ninety-Fifth Street."
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might ge
Did you know? Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was originally created as a promotion for the Montgomery Ward department store. The character first appeared in a 1939 book, and then later in this 1948 film. As far as we can tell, the Library has the only complete version of the original 1948 release!
In celebration of the release of “Wicked,” we decided to dig up the original source material for all things Oz, the first edition of Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” published in 1900. The copy shown here by Rare Book and Special Collections Division chief Stephanie Stillo has been completely digitized so you can read it at home! Just visit the link in our bio.
#Wicked #WickedMovie #wizardofoz
Welcome to the Library of Congress accelerated aging lab!
Kelsey Beeghly, 2023-2024 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow, and Andrew Davis, chemist in the Preservation and Research Testing Division, demonstrate how the Library uses aging experiments with test samples to speed up and investigate the naturally-occurring reactions which cause materials to break down over time.
This kind of testing is practical, allowing Library staff to make preservation relevant decisions without waiting hundreds of years.
This Native American Heritage Month, learn more about the largest body of early Indigenous American music recordings in the U.S.: about 10,000 wax cylinders of songs and stories at the Library of Congress. Many of them are recordings made by Omaha ethnographer Francis La Flesche (pictured), the first professional Native American ethnologist and a member of the Omaha Nation.
Although early wax recordings can be scratchy and faint, they are still an invaluable resource. They allow us to hear voices of the past and help preserve Indigenous cultures and languages. This La Flesche recording is titled "Funeral Song."
In 1979, the Library's American Folklife Center launched the Federal Cylinder Project to preserve the contents of the wax cylinders on more modern mediums. Learn more: https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2013/11/indigenous-american-cylinder-recordings-and-the-american-folklife-center/?loclr=fbloc
Photo courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Photograph No. 4504.
Since the #WorldSeries begins this evening in Los Angeles, we thought we’d share this Library of Congress treasure. About a decade ago, the parents of a Library Moving Image Preservation Specialist happened to find some nitrate film reels in a neighbor’s attic. It turned out to be this extremely rare footage of the final game of the 1924 World Series!
Absolutely nobody wants Library of Congress collections getting WET. 🫣
However, it does happen from time to time, and that’s why the Preservation Emergency Response Team (PERT) exists. They are on-call to help mitigate damage when, for different reasons, collections encounter water.
Recently, a training was held for the PERT members so they could get more comfortable handling large, wet paper items, such as maps and posters. (No Library collection items were damaged in the making of this video! All of these items were acquired specifically for this training.)
This World Blindness Awareness Month, we wanted to share with you that the Library of Congress offers by-appointment Touch History tours for visitors who are blind or who have visual impairments! Contact the Library’s Visitor Engagement Office to learn more about how to schedule a tour. Just go to loc.gov/visit and click “Contact Visitor Engagement” on the lefthand menu.
Video description: Video shows a group of four blind visitors participating in the Touch History tour at the Library of Congress. Members of the tour group are shown reading a braille brochure, touching models of the Library of Congress, and feeling architectural and artistic features of the building’s walls.
African American filmmaking began in the silent era when independent producers made movies, known as race films, for segregated audiences. Like the vast majority of silent era film productions, most race films of this period are lost. In fact, hardly any material survives that was shot by Black filmmakers prior to 1920.
The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, helmed by brothers George P. Johnson and Noble Johnson (arguably, the first Black movie star), made five feature films between 1916 and 1922. All had been considered lost apart from four surviving minutes of their last feature, “By Right of Birth” (1921), archived at the Library of Congress but severely deteriorated due to nitrate decomposition.
Recently, film and media historian and professor Cara Caddoo discovered that the “By Right of Birth” fragment actually contains within it a 15-second clip from another film called “The Trooper of Troop K” (1916), making it the earliest surviving footage produced by a Black film company.
Read more: https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2022/10/looking-and-looking-again-at-black-film-history/?loclr=fbloc
When Library of Congress conservators are treating an object, sometimes they need more information than what is available to the naked eye to determine the best course of action. In this case, the Conservation Division needed to know which metals are present in the inks used in this beautiful Hokusai print, to avoid using techniques that could spread chemically reactive metal ions across the paper. Here’s how the Preservation Research and Testing Division came to the rescue!
#libraries #LibraryScience
A lot of you have asked us about our mold remediation routine, so here it is!
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