Gregg Writer 1903-1982 on the Internet Archive

At the end of March 2021, the Internet Archive published the Gregg Writer/Today’s Secretary magazine Volumes 6 through 84 (9-1903 through 5-1982). This is the entire run of both magazines, except for Gregg Writer Volumes 1 -5 (4-1899 through 8-1903).

The good news is that you can download images for all magazines through 1961. You can borrow and view all the digital magazines from 1962 through 1982.

The bad news is that more than half of the shorthand plates are very poor quality and very difficult to read. There are several images that are light, faded, blurred, and cut off at the margins. These magazines were scanned at a very low resolution from a poor-quality grayscale microfilm collection. The original source was a set of bound volumes. Whoever created the original microfilms did not push the volumes down very hard when the images were being scanned. The individuals who created the digital scans used a very light scan setting, which resulted in very light pages.

There is a lot of excellent material in this collection, however. Many of the shorthand plates are very easy to read. The Gregg Writer scans are in much worse shape than Today’s Secretary.

Each issue of the magazine has its own webpage on the Internet Archive. I would strongly recommend that you do not waste your time downloading the PDF files, which are extremely low resolution. Instead, you should download the JP2 zip files that contain all of the images for the magazine issue. The JP2 files are double the resolution of the scans in the PDF files.

Several of these Gregg Writer volumes have been scanned at a much higher quality elsewhere and are easily available on the Internet. This includes Volumes 2 through 21, with the exception of Volumes 12 and 20.

A link to the Internet Archive page with these magazines is included below:
https://archive.org/details/pub_todays-secretary


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  1. I have reviewed Volumes 6 through 53. Here is some detail of what I found:

    The following volumes have decent Shorthand plates:  12, 27-30, 34-36, 41-43, 50-51, 53

    The following volumes have very poor quality Shorthand plates:  20, 22-26, 31-33, 37-40, 44-49, 52

    Volume 53 is the first volume of Today’s Secretary. It seems that the shorthand plates in the Today’s Secretary scans are much higher quality than the ones in the Gregg Writer in this collection. 

    I did not look at anything past Volume 53, as I am not interested in Simplified Shorthand or later versions.

    I did not review the following volumes because they are already available elsewhere on the Internet in much better quality:  6-11, 13-19, 21

     

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