Thanks to Huntington News Network for the heads up on the new digital archive of Wonderful West Virginia. The West Virginia Division of Natural Resources has assembled an online archive of issues going back to the publication’s inception in 1936 (when it had a different title.)

The archives are available at http://www.wvdnr.gov/wwvmagazine/Archive/Archive.html. Pick a year, starting with 1936. (Not every year will have an issue, and some years will have missing issues.) I picked 1943. I got a list of 11 issues (June was missing) with a thumbnail of each issue and a link to a PDF. Downloading one issue I got a 24-page PDF that for the most part was scanned well and easy to read.

Unfortunately each page had a GIANT (diagonal across the entire page) watermark reading COPYRIGHT WV DNR. I don’t begrudge them the watermark, but dude. It was dark gray, in some cases darker than the letters it was covering, and sometimes made pages difficult to read.

This is a simple archive — year search, no keyword search — but there’s a lot of content and you can download back issues as full PDFs. I’d just tone down that watermark a bit…