“You’ll Never Be Grumpy if You Do Your Motoring in a Vauxhall”: the St Andrews Citizen 60 years ago

speccoll
Friday 12 October 2012
The new Bookeye 3 colour scanner, ready to scan the 1910-1911 volume of the St Andrews Citizen.

Greetings once again from the Scanning Suite here at Special Collections. This post brings you a few images from the St Andrews Citizen, our local newspaper. The University of St Andrews Library holds microfilm editions of this newspaper and here at Special Collections we hold the full run of the Citizen from its beginning in 1870. They are interesting to a variety of researchers and students for academic and more personal ventures. These big, bound volumes –that have decreased in size with the passing of time—can be challenging to handle due to their size, age and fragility. They can also pose difficulties to scan for these same reasons, and sometimes fulfilling one scanning request requires two bodies and four hands.

A full-page spread celebrating and promoting the screening of Walt Disney’s feature-length animation Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at St Andrews Cinema House, from the 7 January 1939 issue of the St Andrews Citizen.

The window that newspapers provide into times past is invaluable, as showcased from the following images. This post’s title is a case in point, as it is taken from an advertisement printed in the 7th January 1939 edition of the Citizen, part of a special full-page spread celebrating and promoting the screening of Walt Disney’s feature-length animation Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (above). You will also see what St Andrews citizens read about 62 years ago by viewing the full, eight-page reproduction of the 12 October 1940 edition of the newspaper (below).

St Andrews Citizen

12 October 1940

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Do peruse the advertisements if nothing else as they give a real flavour of the times. We might now smile at advice such as ‘To Keep Calm… Healthful Delicious Wrigley’s Spearmint Chewing Gum is a Daily Necessity’, or ‘Strengthen the Home –Front’ with OXO cubes, but features such as Royal’s ‘Eggless Recipes’ are a reminder that rationing  and war were part of reality not that long ago.

Iris Papaemmanouil

Reprographics Technician

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