Harvard Lampoon & Google Books project

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 2/16/07, Bapopik at aol.com <Bapopik at aol.com> wrote:
>
> (http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC01751806&id=1hAUAAAAIAAJ&q="hot+dog"+and+harvard+lampoon&dq="hot+dog"+and+harvard+lampoon&ie=ISO-8859-1)
[...]
> Published 1876
> Harvard Lampoon  Original from the New York Public Library  Digitized Oct 24, 2006
> ...
> There are three matching pages--89, 198, 134. No dates are given. No text  is
> given--just the top of the page reading "The Harvard Lampoon."
> ...
> Is there no way to read the text or to find the date of the text? How could
> Google Books be so stupid with information probably in the public domain (over
>  75 years old)?

If a text seems like it's misdated, one trick is to search the text
for year numbers. Looks like these issues are from 1902-03.

http://books.google.com/books?id=1hAUAAAAIAAJ&q=1902
matches 24 pages, including:
p. ?: Vol. XLIV, No. 1. October 16, 1902.
p. 26: Vol. XLIV. No. 2. October 31, 1902.

http://books.google.com/books?id=1hAUAAAAIAAJ&q=1903
matches 23 pages, including:
p. 127: Vol. XLIV. No. 7. January 20, 1903.

There are also references to members of the Class of 1904, 1905, and 1906.

--Ben Zimmer

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