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At Inside Google Books (LIFE magazine now available on Google Books), product manager Brandon Badger blogs,

When I was a kid I used to enjoy thumbing through a collection of older magazines that my grandfather had at his house. I remember flipping through the pages and feeling as though I was peeking through a window into life from decades past. Unfortunately, we lost my grandfather's magazines some time ago, and we've never quite managed to recreate his collection. But I know that if we could, those magazines would be just as fascinating today as they were years ago, which is why we've been partnering with publishers to digitize magazines and bring them online.

I'm excited to announce that starting today, visitors to Google Books will be able to search and browse even more magazines on Google Books. We've partnered with Life Inc. to digitize LIFE Magazine's entire run as a weekly: over 1,860 issues, covering the years from 1936 to 1972. ..

In 1937, the ads were for Studebaker, Kelvinator, Vitalis, Cream of Kentucky Bourbon; "Discovered: The germ that causes dandruff" and the cure was... Listerine. Life Magazine was both a photographer's showcase and the weekly history of how we lived, what we cared about, bought, knew and looked like. It's what our culture used to be.

It's all served up by Google, with full-text search, thumbnail views and lots of photos, primarily of people. Some were famous -- that's Greta Garbo in 1937 at right -- but others are not, especially inside the magazine. Movies matter, but so do frontier nurses and group baptisms. It's all there.

Of local interest, Rhode Island society held a ball at RISD museum in 1956, an altogether grand time, and Life was there.

Last November I blogged, Google publishes millions of Life Magazine photos -- and they're searchable. This is not those: It's the entire magazines. Scroll the pages.

Start at the beginning -- Nov. 23, 1936 -- by clicking LIFE - Google Books. You can navigate to the rest from there.

There are tools at the top of each issue that let you zoom and view a thumbnail gallery of each page in an issue, if you choose. Unfortunately, you can't sort Google Books search results by date, and that is also true within these issues of Life.

 Tags  Life Magazine

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