Knowledge at your fingertips (if your fingers are 100,000 miles long)

Knowledge so weighty, it has a gravitational pull

VICTORIA, Texas - I was reading an article from a late-1950s issue of Life magazine on microfiche and stumbled upon this ad (click image for full size), another dark reminder of the horrible days before the internet. This was the way things used to be - a massive stack of books, originating in Europe of course, stretching a good bit of the way to the Moon.

If you're looking for something to occupy your time one idle afternoon, head to the library and read the ads in an old magazine on microfiche. Just sitting in front of one of those reading contraptions gives you a veneer of intellectualism, if you want such a thing, and some of the ads are real howlers today. (Assuming you don't mind reading in photo-negative, I inverted the pic above).

Really, can someone not grab all these fiches, scan 'em, and just post them somewhere? And, while you're at it, do it with all the books too. But, oh then, we'd have no need for these big libraries, and where would the indigents hang out all day? Never mind.