Tamiment - Grace Weber

The Tamiment Library was one of my favorite class visits as far as being educationally stimulated. I had been searching online for information about the Masses magazine and hadn't really found anything good before going to the Tamiment, so I was extremely excited when a real live Masses magazine was pulled out of the box! I stayed after to look through one of the books with a large collection of Masses issues in it, and I had so much fun reading through the pages. I had read somewhere that the Masses was one of the most well-designed magazine of its time, so I was interested to see how the pages were laid out and how they handeled art work within the magazine and everything. I was also very interested in seeing what the writing style was like and how "news stories" were told. I found it interesting that most of the news was told in story-like form. It was very dramatic writing and some of the stories almost reminded me of a soap opera. I wondered if the stories were actually true. I realized that there may be a strong possibilty that some of the stories were not true, and instead were made-up stories intended to make commentary on controversial events or issues that were going on at the time. Considering that the Masses whole intended purpose was to speak out on the social issues of the time, and to do that in a creative and sometimes comical way, having made up stories within the magazine would make sense. Of course, I would have to research that idea more to actually say that is what they did.

I also thought the two librarians at the Tamiment did a great job presenting the information to us. They were excited about the ephemera and other items they had and they were passionate about sharing their knowledge with us. I thought they picked out things that would relate well to us and could potentially help us with our final projects. I loved when the woman librarian (i forgot her name!) pulled out those awesome posters from the 60's and 70's and I think from recent times as well. They were so beautiful and I thought it was so cool that they were preserving them at the Tamiment.