The University of Chicago Library launched a website last month allowing visitors free access to The Chicagoan, an arts and culture magazine fashioned after The New Yorker. Neil Harris, Preston & Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History and Art History, discovered the nearly complete run of the magazine in the Regenstein Library in the late 1980s. He later edited a book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, exploring the magazine’s ambitions and situating it in the historical context of 1920s Chicago.

 

The magazine was digitized using the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library’s Digitization Laboratory’s new Zeutschel overhead scanner, which allowed the library to scan bound volumes in house, in a face-up position. “As an online, searchable resource, the Chicagoan facilitates new avenues of study and the ability to zoom in and out on images, while preserving the original print volumes from excessive handling,” said Alice Schreyer, Assistant University Librarian for Humanities, Social Sciences & Special Collections and Curator of Rare Books.

 

Digital copies of The Chicagoan, which lasted from 1926 to 1935, can be found here.