The Prints and Photographs Division preserves substantial runs of the following illustrated and comic weeklies:

• Harper's Weekly
• Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
• Puck
• Judge

These pictorial publications contain a wealth of imagery reflecting social issues and attitudes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Searching the Collection

Many images that researchers or staff have requested for reproduction can be searched in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. Records for images from the illustrated weeklies do not have their own separate category in the online catalog, but they can be searched by name or subject in combination with the title of the publication.

The Prints & Photographs Division's copies of the original volumes of the publications are not served in the reading room because of their fragility, although researchers can purchase quality copies of individual pages (cite date, volume and page when ordering copies through Library of Congress Duplication Services). To look for images for which no online record exists, onsite researchers can:

• check the Prints & Photographs Division Specific Subject Index (some images for which copy photographs exist do not yet have full online records)
• use subscription databases that offer full text access to the periodicals' contents (e.g. HarpWeek indexes and reproduces Harper's Weekly)
• view microfilm copies of the periodicals that are available in the Microform Reading Room. Original or microfilm copies of the periodicals may also be held by other libraries.