"Loud reading annoys your neighbors"

I'm not supposed to be blogging today—but I've already posted two thingies this a.m., so here's a third, and then there will be radio silence on this end for a while. (Ha!)

Over at Restricted View, Dizzyhead Mollie has a great post about silent-movie title cards:

One of the cards said..."Please be patient while the operator changes a reel." I paired it with another request: "Please read the titles to yourself—loud reading annoys your neighbors." A simple request, but totally revealing, no? It communicates something concrete about the everyday experience of going to the movies in the pre-talkies era, a detail that isn't part of the official film-history account and is therefore not part of anybody's mental image of what moviegoing was like in its early years, even though it seems totally obvious now that I think about it. Of course people read the titles out loud!