The Mystery Of The Unknown Guide! This is the center portion of a local TV listings booklet I found on eBay last year. It must have been stored in a basement somewhere, judging by the condition. It nearly disintigrated while it was being scanned; the last page is attached by only a few threads of pulp. The booklet is missing its first eight and last eight pages. The first page with the Lassie illustration is not the original cover, but page nine. You can see the whole thing in a series of high-resolution scans starting at this page. The question arises, what exactly is it? The eBay seller had no information about it at all. I don't think it is a newspaper insert; if it were, it would have the paper's logo on it somewhere. The house ad on page 11 names the publication as TV This Week. I doubt it was a direct competitor to TV Guide - my guess is that it was a free handout of the kind once offered at supermarket checkout counters. (Remember those?) It wasn't hard to date it. June Lockhart joined the cast of Lassie in 1958, so I'm reasonably certain this item is from September of that year. Here are some interesting details to note: Each day's programming is represented by two pages of descriptive listings of selected programs, followed by two pages of a comprehensive listing in a grid format. In the descriptive listings, movies are listed by the name of the show in which they were aired - the name of the movie is shown only in the grid. The "real" TV Guide at the time also listed the names of movie shows, and kept the practice until about the mid-60s. I'm wondering if the stations placed more expectations on identifying a time slot with a show name than with the plain fact that a movie was being aired then. Certainly local channels were naming their movie programs for far longer than the guides were listing them as such. It's a really minor point, but it's a question I've had since wondering way back when why Creature Features and The Ghoul were always just listed as "Movie -- Melodrama" in the guide. Some of the movie shows are studio-specific. Saturday has Warner Brothers Theatre on KTVU, MGM Matinee and two airings of Best of MGM on KGO. There's also a 20th Century Fox Theatre which aired on more than one channel. These shows no doubt reflect the purchase of packages from the studios themselves. The studios at the time were still very nervous about competition from TV, and conflicted about selling their back libraries to stations, particularly films made after 1948. Valley Playhouse was already the name of KCRA Channel 3's afternoon movie, as it would be for another 10 years. Channel 10 out of Sacramento carries the call letters KBET; they didn't become KXTV until 1960. KSBW Channel 8 advertises all three networks in their ad. Channel information in copies of the "real" TV Guide from the time show other stations also having multiple affiliations. Anyone know how this worked? It would seem that scheduling conflicts would be inevitable, particularly with all three networks represented by a single channel. Most intriguing of all is this late Saturday night 12:30am screening of the 1953 monster movie NEANDERTHAL MAN on KRON. As the listing shows, it was aired under the show title Nightmare, which would likely be the show sometimes also referred to as Nightmare Theatre, hosted first by one John Barclay, and later by Russ Coughlin. You can read a bit more about Nightmare at the E-gor's Chamber Of Horror Hosts entries for Barclay and Terrence. E-gore's gives 1957 as the year Nightmare began, and cites a near-riot provoked in Berkeley by the show in November of that year. I have a "real" TV Guide from March 1957 and another from April 1958, neither of which shows a horror show in this slot or any other on KRON. It may be that Nightmare Theatre was intermittently aired. It could also be that my dating of this guide to 1958 is off by a year, something I'll check by comparing the listings to the Examiner's TV listings for this week next time I'm at the library. You can browse the entire guide here. The scans are larger than the orignal size to make the fine print easier to read. I chose to not clean them up in Photoshop, as the yellowing paper seems to add to the character of the find.