January 26, 2005 World War I Newspaper Pictorials Featured In New Online Presentation

A new online presentation from the Library of Congress, “Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures,” features leading newspapers of the day that took advantage of this newly available printing process during the Great War (1914-1918). The presentation, available at https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/rotogravures, is from the Library’s American Memory Web site of more than 9.5 million items.

Rotogravure printing, which produced richly detailed, high-quality illustrations -- even on inexpensive newsprint paper -- was used to create vivid pictorial sections. Publishers that could afford to invest in the new technology saw sharp increases both in readership and advertising revenue. Rotogravure is widely used today to print many of the tabloid magazines seen on newsstands as well as Sunday newspaper magazines and other supplements. The “ Newspaper Pictorials” presentation offers an explanation of this process.

The images in this collection track American sentiment about the war in Europe, week by week, before and after the United States became involved. Events of the war are detailed alongside society news and advertisements touting products of the day, creating a pictorial record of both the war effort and life at home. Users can browse the materials by date and publication title, such as The New York Times, The New York Tribune and The War of the Nations.

American Memory is a project of the Library of Congress. Its more than 125 collections, which range from the papers of U.S. presidents, Civil War photographs and early films of Thomas Edison to papers documenting the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements, Jazz Age photographs and the first baseball cards, include more than 9.5 million items from the Library of Congress and other major repositories. The latest Web site from the Library is the monthly Wise Guide (www.loc.gov/wiseguide), which demonstrates that “It’s Fun to Know History.”