Theatre Playbills

[Watson]

For a year or two, until recently, I had been searching the marvellous collection of playbills on the website British Library Theatrical Playbills 1600-1902  http://blplaybills.org

Now I can't connect to it - a problem I have had for at least a few weeks.  Does anyone understand why this might be?

Thanks and regards.

[Treetotal]

I just tried the link and it doesn't work for me either 
Carol

[hepburn]

https://www.rootschat.com/links/01s7j/    Would this be it?It looks to have lots of PDF files which I didn't look into.

[Watson]

Treetotal: Thank you, it is reassuring to know I'm not the only one affected.

Hepburn:  Thank you.  The webpage you linked to contains similar material, but I don't understand how it relates to the site that I've been using, or how to use it.  Can one use it to do searches in the playbills?  The dates covered seem different (1660?)

[Chris Doran]

i can't access it directly either, but it's on The Wayback Machine and I was able to do a couple of searches. Not all results led me to playbills, though, and those with the WM  portico ("birdcage") icon said NO PREVIEW AVAILABLE. Maybe this is normal?

[Watson]

Thanks for that, Chris.  I tried three searches on the Wayback Archive, using theatres and an actor as search terms, but each time I received the message, "No playbills found".  That isn't normal.  I didn't follow what you meant by the portico icon and "NO PREVIEW AVAILABLE".   

[Chris Doran]

Sorry, the Wayback Machine can't do searches on the databases of sites it archives. In fact, I was a little surprised to even be able to find and view playbills.

If you look up Rebecca, for example, the 5th and 6th squares show a "birdcage" thumbnail and if you click on it you get the "NO PREVIEW AVAILABLE", but there is some basic index information.

[Watson]

Thanks, Chris.  When I used "Rebecca" as a search term, I received the same "No playbills found".  I didn't notice any squares.  We must be doing something different.  Can you tell me the date of the snapshot you used on Wayback?

[Chris Doran]

Hmmm. I just went to archive.org, put http://blplaybills.org/ into the URL box and got taken straight to playbills' Search page. There was an error message  in the middle of the page above a big magnifying glass but when I entered a play name I got a chessboard of thumbnails to click on. Wayback seems to have changed since I last used it and there was no timeline and calendar page to select a date, though there is a list of years on the left, along with what look like variousselecrion options I haven't played with.

This page is my results page for Rebecca. Most of the thumbnails go to pages for people called Rebecca rather than playbills.

I've tried the Edge and Chrome browsers on Windows 10.