Search the entertainment trade press full text.

Lantern indexes the Media History Digital Library: Variety, Billboard, the New York Clipper, Motion Picture Herald, the studio year books and the fan magazines, roughly 1900-1960. This is the industry's own press - where stage acts were reviewed, booked and gossiped about by the trade that employed them - rather than general news coverage.

THE DEFAULT OPERATOR IS OR, NOT AND. Bare words are combined with OR, so thought reader matches every page holding either word (272,059) while "thought reader" matches the phrase (27). Always quote a phrase, or join words with AND. Boolean AND, OR and NOT work; wildcards and proximity do not.

Each result resolves to one scanned leaf and carries its keyword-in-context excerpt inline, with matches in {braces}, so no further call is needed to judge a hit.

Download one leaf's OCR text, returning the path to the cached file.

Use only when the search excerpt is not enough and the whole page has to be read or grepped. This is expensive per volume: the Internet Archive serves OCR per volume rather than per page, so the first leaf of a volume costs an 8-25 MB download and every later leaf of that volume is then free.