I”m a sucker for these sorts of things.

I own DVDs with complete runs of The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, MAD, and National Lampoon. So when I was in Barnes & Noble this morning, I couldn’t resist what I was seeing on the bargain table: a massive (472 12-inch x 15-inch pages) hardcover packaged with three DVDs that house all 54,693 New York Times front pages.

The pages are all in .pdf form, and the text in them is searchable. So I was able to learn that the first instance of the word “terrorism” on the front page of the Times was on April 26, 1855 (the two-cent paper was then known as “The New York Daily Times”) in a letter from one Dr. Charles A. Peck describing his “escape from the clutches of Spanish terrorism in Cuba.”

It’s amazing to be able to read front-page reports of The Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea and the Vietnam War, and to explore how the paper covered events like the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination and 9/11. (Those of us born at a certain time probably have many of those actual papers stored in our basements.)

If you want to read the complete version of any front-page article, it’s available by clicking on the masthead of that day’s paper and visiting the Times’ online archive. (For example, here’s the link for the Peck letter mentioned above.)

For less than 20 bucks, it’s one of the best holiday presents a news junkie could want. Check out the online listing over here. It’s $19.99 in the bricks-and-mortar store, but you get 20% off if you’re a B&N member.

“A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.”
—Dorothy Parker

Digging into the past to see how people predicted their future (our present-day) is always fun — and Paleo-Future (my new favorite Web site; how did I not know about this sooner?!) seems to be the go-to place for this sort of thing.

A coupla weeks ago I posted some predictions for 2000 that were made in a 1989 issue of Omni magazine. Here’s a better one from P-F: predictions for 1993 that were made in 1893 in the Newark Daily Advocate. They pretty much anticipate blogging, which is sorta creepy.

Three decades. Wow.

Spotted recently on the Long Island Expressway.