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Category / Movie / Music / Book Junkie

Ye Oldest Public Library in the English Speaking World

What is there to see in Manchester? Surely there must me more to the industrial city in northwest England than football? Alas, Manchester gave the world a surprising amount of excellent things. The first atom splitting was achieved at Manchester University in 1919 and the man credited as the father of modern day computer science, was a Mancunian…

Vintage Dude du Jour: James Bond’s Big Brother

Meet Captain Peter Fleming, English explorer and intelligence agent who wrote a spy novel before James Bond had even been created by his younger brother, Ian Fleming. When he was 25 years old, Peter replied to an advertisement in The Times recruiting volunteers for an expedition to the Amazon to ascertain the fate of the missing explorers who…

Seriously Though, How Did the Most Beautiful Library in America Get Demolished?

The old Public library of Cincinnati was the sort of place you only see in a Harry Potter film; colossal cast-iron book alcoves and spiral staircases that went several stories high, checker board marble floors that shone beneath the skylight roof; a magnificent maze of books that is now lost forever. In 1955, without a whimper, the building was demolished when…

A Brief Compendium of Vintage Hollywood Test Shots

Ah, the pressures of Picture Day. Who can’t relate to the anxiety of getting that perfect shot for a yearbook, driver’s license, or, in this case, beloved Hollywood classic? For actors like Audrey Hepburn and Liz Taylor, sitting for test shots was all in a day’s work. We wish we could travel back in time…

The Groovy Imitation Bands of 1960s Japanese Rock

When the Beatles arrived in Japan in June of 1966, they caused as much pandemonium when they did when they triggered Beatlemania in the United States in 1964. A total of 8,400 policemen were mobilized for security at a cost of 90 million yen and more than 6,500 Japanese teenagers were taken into custody. They had been…

When Hollywood Movie Posters Can’t Be Imported: A Bootleg Retrospective

Far from the gleaming multiplex cinemas most of us are accustomed to, there are places that can’t afford the printers needed for making movie posters, let alone the legal rights to actually screen blockbuster Hollywood films. As a result, locals will try their hand at drawing the posters for their bootleg screenings… First let’s take…

Murder in the Blueprints of Frank Lloyd Wright

The legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright never wore his heart on his sleeve. For better or for worse, he dressed up his blueprints in his feelings, and nowhere is that reflex so painfully clear than in his handful of mysterious, pre-Colombian-inspired houses built in California in the early 1920s. You could call them “the…

Shopping for Music in the ’60s Was Awesome. Today, Not So Much.

Welcome to the HMV store in mid 20th century London! Why not take a turn in one of the space age listening booths… Or hang out at the Cosmopolitan Corner and be all… cosmopolitan. Meet some other cool cats in this music library / lounge … Toot toot! Beep beep! And you might as well…

The Real-life Film Actors Who Inspired Iconic Disney Cartoon Characters

It’s hard to imagine our favorite Disney films any other way, but some of the most popular animated characters of our childhoods started out as real as you and I. These rare images of live-action scenes spliced with Disney animations, reveal how the creative studio used real people to reference or even directly trace their…

The Last Beatles Photo Shoot

You could have cut the tension with a knife (0r with George Harrison’s giant hat) … They had just finished recording the last album they would ever make together, and relations between the four band members of the Beatles were at an all-time low. George Harrison had walked out for five days during the recording…

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