Medieval missionary discovering the point where heaven and earth meet, twentieth-century coloration of black-and-white engraving from The Atmosphere, by Camille Flammarion, 1888.

Medieval missionary discovering the point where heaven and earth meet, twentieth-century coloration of black-and-white engraving from The Atmosphere, by Camille Flammarion, 1888.

The Future

Volume IV, Number 4 | fall 2011

Miscellany

“We don’t like their sound,” an executive at Decca Records said in 1962, rejecting The Beatles, adding, “and guitar music is on the way out.” The same year, Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The book is dead. That is to say sometime before the end of the present century, the last printed book will roll off the presses.”

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.

—Edmund Burke, 1790

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The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.
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DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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