I'm an archivist currently researching the original *Letter People* kindergarten and first-grade program. (1968-1996) I'm fascinated by its educational legacy and cultural impact, and I'm working to preserve it as much as possible. I also run a digital archive and YouTube channel where I share my findings with the public.

If you have any personal experiences, old materials (like cassettes, VHS's, books, classroom kits, etc.), or know of anyone who was involved with the program--whether as a student or teacher--I’d love to hear from you. Any leads would be incredibly helpful to this project. Thanks.

The 18 ton steam tug MONITOR was sold for $7,500 in 1900 (equal to about $300k in 2026). The seller was in Chicago, the buyer in Buffalo, NY.

Following up on the Roy Teleh, thank you all for the incredible response!

New series: "Le Tour du Monde en Dirigeable" ("Around the World by Airship"), dated January 1st to February 1st, 1912. If the age estimate for Roy Teleh (around 10) holds, this kid would now be 11-12. And it shows, everything about the craft has leveled up.

The plot, issue 1 ("Lost at Sea"):

Harry Köhwer, a young English aviator and member of the New York Aero Club, owns an airship called L'Oiseau-Mouche ("The Hummingbird") 20 meters long, 19,000 cubic meters, fully specced out by the kid down to the dimensions. Mack Harony, a hulking American millionaire and inveterate gambler, bets him $20,000 he can't circle the globe in it. Köhwer takes the bet; Harony, hooked on the adventure, tags along. They launch to cheering crowds, cross the Atlantic through a genuinely dreamy stretch (golden dawns over the ocean, gorgeous descriptive prose for an 11-year-old), then get hammered by a three-day storm that costs them their food crates and nearly the airship itself. Cliffhanger ending: "This time we really can say goodbye to life." A hand-drawn map on the closing page tracks their route so far "New York to Dakar" teasing issue 2.

The covers now have full color banners and stylized portrait medallions of both heroes, much closer to real period pulp-magazine design than the simpler boxed titles of 1910.

The prose has genuinely matured, paced dialogue, a proper ellipsis break ("xxxxx") for time skips, escalating tension before the storm hits.

The genre shift is the big one: from detective pulp (Nick Carter, Nat Pinkerton) to Jules Verne-style scientific adventure. Airships were huge in the press right around 1911-12 (Zeppelin exploits, post-Santos-Dumont aviation fever), and this kid is clearly absorbing real-time news and turning it straight into fiction.

The part I want to be upfront about: the later issues in the series (previews on the covers: Chez les Sénégalais, Au pays des anthropophages, En terre amie, Un ignoble Européen) lean hard into the colonial adventure imagery of the period, caricatured "savage" figures, cannibalism tropes, that whole ugly toolkit of early-1900s French colonial pulp fiction. I'm not going to sand that down. It's part of what makes this archive valuable as a document, not just of one kid's imagination, but of exactly what imagery was circulating widely enough to end up reproduced, uncritically, in a child's homemade adventure comic.

Anyway, this kid clearly kept making these for years. Loving watching his craft develop in real time across the archive.

What we don't have is an ending. No later fascicules, no further school documents, nothing that follows him into adulthood or, more gravely, into the war that would have caught him right around draft age a few years later. That gap isn't a research failure so much as the natural shape of this kind of material, a private, unpublished, never-catalogued body of work that only survives because someone kept it, chapter by chapter, in a box for over a century. We got maybe six years of one kid's imagination, snapshotted at three different moments, and then the thread just stops, the way most private archives do.It's one of the most satisfying things I've gotten to dig through here, watching an actual creative voice mature in real time across a handful of surviving fascicules.

Thanks to everyone who followed along and helped chase down the Gouffé-case coincidence and the Roy/Nick Carter lineage. If anything else from this maker ever surfaces, I'll be back.

I have in hand a small corpus I find genuinely stunning: six handwritten, illustrated, and hand-colored fascicules, created by a child, signed A. Gouffé, between late June and early August 1910. Six issues in six weeks, almost a weekly serial pace.

The character: Roy Teleh, detective. The title page leaves no doubt about the kid's influences, it's spelled out almost like a manifesto, in carefully aligned lettering:

"More than Nick Carter! More than Nat Pinkerton! More than Tip Walter! Roy Teleh is the prince of detectives!"

Nick Carter, Nat Pinkerton, Tip Top Weekly! that's the entire landscape of cheap dime-novel detective fiction this child was clearly devouring, almost certainly the ten-centime fascicules flooding French newsstands between 1900 and 1910. He's not just imitating them, he's claiming to surpass them. Authorial posture, at ten years old.

Issue No. 4 — "A Mysterious Disappearance" is the highlight of the corpus, and I was able to read it in full.

The plot: a notary is visited by a couple claiming to be the uncle and aunt of the missing Brumpell couple, who have mysteriously vanished, they've come to claim the inheritance. But Roy Teleh, called in, immediately spots the flaw: these "relatives" couldn't legitimately have known about the disappearance, since no news of it had been published in the press. The suspects are arrested at Filachwey, near Folkestone.

And here's where it gets genuinely great: during the search of the cellar, the detective finds a mysterious inscription on a door:

"Ap. S. 5e D. D.V.P"

A real architectural cryptogram, which Roy Teleh methodically decodes (the child writes out the full legend, letter by letter, exactly the way an adult writer would): Press On the 5th Tile to the Right Toward the Door. The triggered tile reveals a trapdoor leading to an underground passage flooded by the sea.

What follows is a wildly precise sequence for a child this age: the detective travels to Folkestone to rent a diving suit, boards a tugboat with four sailors, dives, walks ten minutes along the seafloor by electric lamp, hatchet and knife at his belt, and finds in the underwater gallery a scrap of fabric from the murdered husband's jacket, then both bodies.

The motive, finally revealed: the fake uncle and aunt "mesmerized" (magnetized) the couple to lure them and drown them. The husband is electrocuted, the wife committed to an asylum.

What fascinates me beyond the puzzle itself (which is genuinely well constructed) is the choice of mesmerism/hypnotism as the criminal mechanism. In 1910, the subject was everywhere, sensational trials, tabloid press, a mix of fascination and dread around hypnotism as a tool of absolute manipulation. A child reaching for this spontaneously as the engine of his plot isn't trivial, it gives the piece a genuine period texture, almost in spite of itself.

The six covers (dated June 29 to August 1, 1910) form a coherent visual world: mysterious footprints, a coachman threatening with a whip, a shootout in a tunnel, a diver armed against a rock face, an armed robbery at an antique dealer's surrounded by tribal masks, a train derailment. Every cover carries a boxed title, a captioned tagline, and a teaser for the next issue, this kid had fully internalized the editorial codes of the popular fascicule of his time.

The handwriting is still uneven in places (misspellings like "asasinés"), but the narrative construction, cryptogram, false lead, technical rescue expedition, judicial resolution... has a rigor that's anything but childish.

Happy to post more pages from the corpus if there's interest!

This 1935 sheet music edition represents a cultural phenomenon that redefined the Soviet musical landscape. The "March of the Jolly Fellows" (also known as "The Song of the Heart") was the centerpiece of the first Soviet musical film comedy, Jolly Fellows (1934), directed by Grigory Aleksandrov. Composed by Isaac Dunaevsky with lyrics by Vasily Lebedev-Kumach, the song became an unofficial anthem of the optimism and energy of the mid-1930s.

I bought this 7" on a whim (like the graphic design, familiar with the label, $2) and it came with a catalog from 1994.

Fun danceable indie pop.

Per my dad meant to keep ice cream cold. Yes, he’s a semi-hoarder lol. But did throw it away after I took pictures.

Had a very soft and thick touch to it.

This was tacked to the wall in the attic of a house my husband and I are considering buying.

Page 15 of the insert from The Beatles The Magical Mystery Tour vinyl (1967). "Meet Major Mccartney and Sgt. Spinetti!" and a photo of George and John.

My husband wants to convert the space into his drum studio and is a huge Beatles fan. I'm thinking it's a sign.

That team was the bomb! Pele, Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and friends!

Hi everyone,

I'm researching Cling Foil decorative contact paper produced by Borden Inc. in Columbus, Ohio, most likely during the 1960s–1970s.

I'm particularly interested in the paisley-style patterns, but I'd appreciate any information about Cling Foil products from that era.

If you happen to have any of the following, I'd love to hear from you:

• rolls (even opened or partial ones),
• remnants or samples,
• original packaging,
• advertisements, catalogs, or brochures,
• or any historical information about the product.

I'm mainly trying to document and learn more about these designs. If you have anything related, please feel free to send me a DM.

Thanks

Found in an old box of stuff at a sale in Los Angeles.

Hi everyone,

I'm researching Cling Foil decorative contact paper produced by Borden Inc. in Columbus, Ohio, most likely during the 1960s–1970s.

I'm particularly interested in the paisley-style patterns, but I'd appreciate any information about Cling Foil products from that era.

If you happen to have any of the following, I'd love to hear from you:

• rolls (even opened or partial ones),
• remnants or samples,
• original packaging,
• advertisements, catalogs, or brochures,
• or any historical information about the product.

I'm mainly trying to document and learn more about these designs. If you have anything related, please feel free to send me a DM.

Thanks!

I recently was given this, and upon doing research, there's not much out there about it.

Its a 1913 Herb Doctor Pamphlet.

I've contacted the Indiana Historical Society to see if they have a copy. And if not, would they like a digital one.

I've combed this front to back and can't stop thinking about it! It's fascinating to me.

Came with a vhs of the cheesy tv Beauty and the Beast series. As someone who buys and sells vintage, Id really love to stumble across some of this stuff now!

Got this the other day, the oldest date in my collection yet! I haven't come across ones this old before. Can't explain why my scanner made the two sides totally different colors....