One of the things I did buy on our trip today.
This came from a book store, not an antique store.
It was, If I recall correctly, $6. Maybe $7.
It was published in 1913.
Adjusting for inflation, 10 cents is roughly $3, so I overpaid a little bit.
I knew nothing about it when I bought it save from what's on the cover "A periodical of protest"
Since then, I've learned some stuff.
Many issues are collected here: https://archive.org/details/pub_philistine-a-periodical-of-protest but on microfilm, and it stops a few years before this issue.
It was published by Elbert Hubbard.
I didn't know a thing about him either.
Turns out, he's the guy who said "When life give you lemons, you make lemon-aid" among other things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbert_Hubbard
He was a self described anarchist and socialist who published a pamphlet called Jesus Was an Anarchist in 1908.
Apparently he was also occasionally an anti-union agitator and fairly procapitalist at various points. People are complicated.
He was part of the american Arts and Crafts movement, and founded a group called The Roycrofts, I think?
This was a magazine produced on letterpress gear by the Roycrofts in upstate NY.
The arts and crafts movement is one of those big complicated, easy to misconstrue things.
It was lots of different movements, really, and the thing that linked them was a rejection of industrialized manufacturing, and a return to DIY.
The Roycrofts, best I can tell, were not actually anti-industrialists, but more pro-doing things well. Many early industrial products were not well made (most industrially produced products still tend to be bad!)
But there were some real reggressives in especially the american branch of the arts and crafts movement. Many of them rejected all modernity, and some of them had some vaguely proto-fascist leanings.
I don't know enough about the Roycrofts to say one way or the other.
Regardless, this is a god damn DIY Zine, self-published by a self described anarchist more than 100 years ago.
That slaps.
That whips.
That does other things.
Going, today, from the last, worst monument to the capitalist excesses of the gilded age, to finding this piece of turn of the century DIY Punk which was published around the same time?
This was very cool.
I got a lot of books today.
Like several months worth.
Included among them were two Mashall McLuhan books. ("The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects" and "Marshall McLuhan: On the Nature of Media Essays, 1952 - 1978")
Several folks here have recommended that I read McLuhan, although I think it was Sundog who finally convinced me.
I haven't seen any of his books in the wild since then until today. I read an ebook of the medium is the message, which felt like cheating.
I've been looking for The Medium is the Massage, which I expect to be more pop-art than book, but I am Very excited about this book of essays.
McLuhan is kind of a weird dude, in that a lot of his works were published in ... pop culture magazines? Life, and Look, and all these other Fluff publications.
He was a serious writer, and one of the first people to really think about and study media as a concept, but he was also very much a pop culture figure.
He's the guy who coined the phrase "The Digital Village" if that means anything to you.
He said that books would survive, but would be eaten by the electronic. He predicted the ebook.
He was the kind of figure that the counterculture movement of the 60s embraced, coopted, extended and reinvented.
The first essay in this book is on advertising, it was originally published in the 50s.
I'm worried about what it might say.
@ajroach42 my parents were going to university at the height of his popularity, and got a chance to watch him lecture, and apparently he was absolutely terrible at it, just horribly boring XD
@ajroach42 I mean, he was apparently boring for an academic professor XD
@Canageek makes sense! His work, for all its pop culture trappings, was intended to be academic. I'd imagine him to be an intensely boring speaker.