This week’s Chicago Reader is running a front page story on Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan’s new book Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News. The book is the result of years spent digging through the Chicago History Museum’s archives to collect over 250 images from the Chicago Daily News—one of the major newspapers circulating in the Chicago area in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and one of the first newspapers to feature black and white photography. As Michael Miner notes in his Chicago Reader review, their time and effort has resulted in a fascinating photo journey into the city’s history:

The Daily News went under in 1978, long before it could have created its own online archive. So the writing in this famously literary paper is largely lost, but the photography survives, and now an anonymous photographer’s strange, wonderful picture of a group of blind children stroking a circus elephant deservedly finds a spotlight as the cover of Chicago Under Glass. It’s a fitting introduction to the book, expressing the idea of reaching out to touch something most alive in the imagination.

The Reader article also points to the Chicago History Museum’s online archive of thousands more photographs from the early days of the Chicago Daily News. Click on the link to check them out.