Present Tense

A second set of John Updike clips on Charlie Rose included Updike's comment that the present tense in the "Rabbit" books was lightening and freeing.

People comment that internet content lacks contextual clues of time and place that are inherent in books and other physical objects with information content.

A reference question bounced between a couple of us on the library

staff took us to a local history book, several phone books of the late 1940s through

early 1960s, and a cemetery index compiled by Genealogical Society volunters a quarter century ago.

In these physical objects we confront time's flow. We imagine an individual human life based on a few obsolete phone numbers on aging pages, dates on a headstone, and a few scattered newspaper paragraphs reduced to images on rolls of microfilm. Not too surprising for a village hardware merchant. But what about famous folks or instantly recognizable objects?

Only a handful of libraries have the leather bound 1879 Patent Gazette or the microfilm copies of that volume containing this forgotten facet of a milestone of American history -- but it is readily available on any net-connected electronic device (if you just know how to find it!)