Google’s Ultimate Magazine Rack
December 11th, 2008
Huffington Post reports that Google “has added a magazine rack to its Internet search engine” and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve been a magazine junkie all my life and own complete runs of Rolling Stone, MAD, National Lampoon and The New Yorker on DVD. Now Google is making me feel like Burgess Meredith in “Time Enough At Last” — that Twilight Zone episode in which the man who loves books finally has all the time in the world to read them. Even better: My eyeglasses are intact.
I gave the Google magazine rack a whirl (for now, you can find it as a subsection of book search) and came upon the May 1977 issue of Popular Science magazine, which reported on a “hobby computer” that’s “comparable to an industrial-size system.” Brace yourself for the specs: It will perform 78 separate instructions and accept up to 65k of memory. Or check out April 1938 in which “Television Gets A Trial.”
You can browse issues of Popular Science back to May 1872 (which includes articles on “Science and Immortality,” “Woman and Political Power,” and “The Early Superstitions of Medicine”), but there’s a lot more to browse than just PopSci. There’s also Popular Mechanics, Jet, Ebony, Mother Jones, Baseball Digest, Women’s Health, Men’s Health, American Cowboy and Vegetarian Times, plus regional magazines like Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Texas and New York. There’s the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Black Belt, Prevention and Negro Digest. There are even a half-dozen copies of the revived Liberty from the 1970s.
Of course, Google is just getting started. I can’t wait for them to digitize Car and Driver so I can read those classic Jean Shepherd columns from the 1970s. Or Esquire. National Geographic. Scientific American. Time and Newsweek. Life and Look. Andy Warhol’s Interview. Those early issues of Spy. Classic movie and gossip magazines. All those funky pulps from the ’30s. The Saturday Evening Post. The list just goes on and on.
What an amazing treasure-trove of American cultural history. All one needs now is all the time in the world.