What’s on TV Tonight?

Walter H. Annenberg, publisher, diplomat, and philanthropist, founded the Annenberg School for Communication in 1958. He owned and operated Triangle Publications, which included ownership of The Philadelphia Inquirer, TV Guide, the Daily Racing Form, and Seventeen Magazine. After Annenberg acquired the magazine The TeleVision Guide from New York attorney Lee Wagner, he released the first issue of TV Guide on April 3, 1953.

According to Annenberg, “television’s growing importance in our daily lives” was the impetus for positioning the guide as a publication “… dedicated to serving constructively the television viewers of America.”

In addition to a subscription to the publication, the Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives (ASCLA) received additional donations of the TV Guide publication over the years. TV Guide gifted the library a microfilm collection of local editions of the guide from 1953 to the mid-1990s.

Eileen O’Malley Spangler, former director of edition management at TV Guide, said, “not even Mr. Annenberg could foresee just how imposing a force television would become almost 50 years later.

Spangler went on to say that the editors at TV Guide believed “the magazine provides a unique reflection of America’s virtual love affair with the medium of television and a catalog of America’s popular culture and entertainment tastes and preferences during the second half of the 20th century.”

In 2003, a local donor in Philadelphia gifted the library nine boxes of guides, approximately 450 issues from September 2-8, 1972 to August 16-22, 2003. A year later, ASCLA accepted a donation from the Free Library of Philadelphia of 198 volumes from April 3- 9, 1953, to December 16-22, 1995.

In the spring of 2024, a team at ASCLA initiated a project to consolidate the printed collections of the TV Guide: deduplicating copies and filling in gaps of missing issues where possible, as well as replacing damaged copies with more intact ones. 

To begin with, the ASCLA team, with the help of Penn student workers, needed to document their entire collection and meticulously review each issue in every volume.

One of the students working on the project, a freshman from the Netherlands, was eager to learn everything about America, from Central Park in New York to the cigarette ads on the back cover of almost every issue of the TV Guide in the 50s and 60s. Another student, who hails from Los Angeles and whose family is from Armenia, was thrilled to stumble upon an article written by Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winner William Saroyan, an Armenian American born in Fresno, CA.  Even though this article was published in the July 13-19, 1974 issue, long before she was born, she found this discovery incredibly personal, almost like unexpectedly running into a neighbor on the street, she says.

The consolidation project concluded at the end of summer 2024. The printed issues of Philadelphia-region TV Guide magazines are housed in the Annenberg School for Communication Library and provide patrons with television program listing information and entertainment- and television-related news. The microfilm collection of local editions is stored offsite and cataloged in PennLibraries catalog.

The Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives collects, preserves, and makes available research materials pertinent to the interdisciplinary field of Communication and its history.

To learn more about the Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives and its holdings or to schedule a reference appointment, please contact the Library Archives staff.

The article originally appeared on Penn Libraries' "Unique at Penn" blog.