derdup:
I'm curious to know the page dimensions of
Le Petit VingtièmeSorry to take so long to get back to you on this, but better late than never...! :-)
I only have a very small sample to which I can refer, but the layout etc. seems to be roughly the same.
For a start, the whole thing is printed on what would originally have been a single sheet of paper, making up four full-sized newspaper pages (two on the front, two on the back), so I guess it came as the centre spread in the paper - remebering that that sheet, when folded once, makes four individual pages in the newspaper.
A copy of
Le Vingtième Siècle would appear (I am extrapolating from my tiny sample) to have been somewhere around 44cm wide and 62cm tall, quite large for a newspaper by today's standards (it's interesting to note (if printing and publishing are an interest to you) that the page size is almost (but not quite) twice the size of a so-called "Berliner" newspaper, which is 31.5cm x 47cm, and was a common size for continental papers in the past (although confusingly not the size of the
Berliner Zeitung newspaper). I imagine that the industry went from papers of the size of the
XXe Siècle to Berliner quite easily with a simple extra fold and cut.
You then took this sheet out (leaving it as it was originally folded in the newspaper), fold that in half, and fold it in half again; once you slit the outer edges (getting an adult to help you, if young, and remembering not to slit the spine!), you had a mini-newspaper 22.5cm wide, and 31cm tall, running to 16 pages.
Inside, four pages were given over to the strips:
Tintin was the centre two pages, facing each other, with the content being roughly equivalent to a single page in an album - the 18/09/1937 edition has what became page 32 of
The Black Island in it.
The other two pages were a subsidiary strip -
J,Z&J in
The Mysterious Ray in the 18/09/37 one, with Jocko on the barrel-organ and at the seance - he also gets the cover, being chased by a policeman. Another one I have has what I think is a
Quick & Flupke bit called
Nocturne, about a blond boy who can't sleep, but as the
Q&F names don't appear I am not certain if it's part of the canon.
The rest is a variety of features, and ads for toys. The ads take up about four pages, although I have one with the back page given over to single panel gag cartoons, so I guess the advertising content was variable to demand - and the approaching Christmas season might have increased the advertising.
There is a piece on the museum at Tervueren written by someone called Dédé, on the same page as a competition to win one of four free trips to the Catholic shrine at Lourdes; an autographed (!) photo of St. Nicholas sending best wishes to the readers; another page is given over to a list of competition winners, and another is a puzzle page.
It seems a bit dry by current standards, but it is not far from the sort of thing that still might have been put out when I was at school in the 70s (I recall a sort of children's newspaper being handed round in French which was similar, just lacking the
Tintin!).
Hope this helps!