IN July, 2007 my parents came across a stash of old newspapers, and pages of The Youth's Companion underneath a drawer in a built-in cabinet in their house. The house was built in the late 20's by my great-grandfather.

THESE pages of The Youth's Companion were addressed to my great uncle, who would've been a young lad at the time, and must've been a great source of entertaining reading, judging by the missing pages and the general condition. Unfortunately only one issue was complete, and time had taken its toll on all of the material there.

I'VE reproduced those pages here for historical purposes, to give a bit of insight into what the kids of the 20's were reading for fun. I think it sure beats sitting in front of the television watching cartoons.

IT'S also interesting to read about the current events of the day, and the contemporary perspectives. The advertising is a lot of fun as well.

I HOPE you enjoy this. If this goes well I will look into acquiring and digitizing more issues, and getting The Youth's Companion Project off the ground.

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The project is an attempt to digitally re-create the archives of The Youth's Companion magazine, as it would appear that the original archives are gone forever. As far as I know, these materials are not covered by any current copyright protection, which would put them into the public domain.

I hope to share these classic bits of Americana with everybody, in the hopes that current and future generations may enjoy them as much as past ones, and that we may learn something in the process.

How Can I Contribute?

You can currently help the project in any of the following ways:

• If you have copies of The Youth's Companion, even individual pages, you can scan them in and e-mail me the raw images. Preferably at 200dpi or better. The address is: chris(at)youthscompanion.com. I'd recommend using an 11x17" scanner if you have access to one, it'd make the job so much easier. If you do use a smaller scanner, please make sure your images have a decent amount of overlap, to ease re-assembly of the pages.


• If you can't scan them in, you e-mail me for information on how to send them my way, and when I've archived them, I will gladly return them to you.


• I will be setting up a donation system through PayPal shortly. All proceeds will go towards paying for the bandwidth this site utilizes, hardware (like an 11"x17" scanner!) and towards acquiring new issues to add to the site.


• I will also set up a list of "benefactors" if you will, so your contribution will be recognized.


• When the archive gets a bit more extensive, I'll make available full-resolution PDFs and CD-ROMs for purchase. Again, all proceeds will go towards running this server and acquiring more issues.


• All proceeds from advertising on this site will go back into the project (as stated above) as well.

Thanks for visiting! I hope you enjoy this bit of American history.

-Chris Ripp chris(at)youthscompanion.com