LIFE magazine now available on Google Books

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager

When I was a kid I used to enjoy thumbing through a collection of older magazines that my grandfather had at his house. I remember flipping through the pages and feeling as though I was peeking through a window into life from decades past. Unfortunately, we lost my grandfather's magazines some time ago, and we've never quite managed to recreate his collection. But I know that if we could, those magazines would be just as fascinating today as they were years ago, which is why we've been partnering with publishers to digitize magazines and bring them online.

I'm excited to announce that starting today, visitors to Google Books will be able to search and browse even more magazines on Google Books. We've partnered with Life Inc. to digitize LIFE Magazine's entire run as a weekly: over 1,860 issues, covering the years from 1936 to 1972. Most of us are familiar with the term "American Century," but chances are few of us have been able to read Henry Luce's defining editorial in its original context, a 1941 issue of LIFE. You'll be able to find and read Leonard McCombe’s iconic cover and photo essay on a Texas Cowboy and Richard Meryman's famous last interview with Marilyn Monroe. You can find a 1968 cover story on Georgia O'Keeffe (which you may want to read if you're visiting the Whitney Museum anytime soon).

You'll even find Alfred Eisenstadt's famous photo of the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on VJ Day in 1945.

This is part of a broader effort across Google to help bring offline content online and allow people to find it with a simple Google web search. In addition to viewing these and other extraordinary photographs printed in the original issues of LIFE, you can also search and browse millions of individual photos produced by LIFE on Google Image Search. The LIFE photography collection on Google Image Search includes more than 10 million images, 97 percent of which were never published in the magazine. Both are blended into Google Web Search, so when you do a search from google.com, you're also searching millions of images and thousand of magazine issues from LIFE.

To start your journey through history, hop on over to Google Books where you can browse through all the available issues of LIFE. Be sure to try out our recently launched Thumbnail View to see the layout of all the pages in the magazine.