Shorpy Sundays

I think it's about time this blog got a regular weekly feature, don't you? Therefore, in the spirit of Shatnerday and Simian Saturday, I hereby announce the launch of Shorpy Sundays!

(This was sort of a spontaneous decision--later Shorpy Sunday posts will pop up earlier in the day.)

For those of you who don't know about it, Shorpy is one of those great Internet treasure troves, an ever-growing collection of high-resolution scans of old photographs. I'm a big proponent of collecting visual reference information for running games. A picture's worth a thousand words, after all; whether you share the pictures with your group in-game or simply study them before a session, they can only help your GMing and scene descriptions.

Fortunately for a pulp/Cthulhu enthusiast such as myself, a large percentage (perhaps the majority) of the pictures cluster around the 1920s. Since discovering Shorpy about a year ago, I've found it to be an invaluable visual reference resource, and I'd like to use this post series to share some of my favorites.

The pictures fall into two general categories: locations and people. The people pics are great fodder for NPCs or even PCs, while the location pics are both evocative and informative. Ever wonder what a 1920s kitchen or nursery or butcher shop looked like? How about a typical street scene? Backyards, custom cars, swimming pools...the list goes on and on, and it's precisely these sorts of mundane details that are so easy to overlook until you actually find yourself needing to describe them.

At any rate, let's get on to the first post in the series. It's one that I feel is appropriate to the eventual subject matter that Shorpy pics inspire, and a little slice of both categories in one pic: just some innocent idol worship. (And doesn't it just scream out to have a Great Old One photoshopped in there?)

1922