The Library of Congress has a new collection of The New York Times Rotogravure from World War I. I was excited to see that the Library of Congress had the same material that I have which meant that I could use it and not need to scan my own collection. The LoC quality was excellent; they had whole pages instead of my partial pages. Then I saw that they don’t have all of the issues. I looked at my collection and the next one I was going to write about was the June 30, 1918, issue. It isn’t available in the Library of Congress Rotogravure collection. My search of the collection showed they have June 2, June 9, June 16, and June 23, but not June 30, 1918.
Top half of the first of six pages included from my 30 June 1918 collection. This half of the page includes: “Jitney Tank;” Lieutenant Aviator Leps; Lieutenant Guerin; Lieutenants Reno, Fonck, and Milton; a Shell-Shelter Village; and a Camouflaged French Road. Click the image or here for the OCRed pages.
Oh my — my collection suddenly became much more important. If I have editions that the Library of Congress does not have, then my collection might be unique. If so, I really need to preserve it digitally. Sadly, in the pages that I have for 30 June 1918, one photo was cut out. It affects that page and the reverse side but not the other pages. I photographed all the pages I have from this June 30th 1918 edition. Then I OCRed (used Optical Character Recognition) the images. There is one page that contains a full-page ad for Tintex, but no war photos, so I did not OCR that page and did not include it in my final product. I assembled the OCRed images into a single Portable Document File. I wish that I had the technology to either photograph the entire image or to be able to adequately stitch the images together; however, I was not happy with the results of my trying to electronically stitch the images.
Here is my attempt with the 30 June 1918 issue. I hope you find the images and stories as interesting and as fascinating as I do.
