Friends know that I have a secret habit of selling old books on the Internet, so I sometimes get shopping bags of books on my doorstep, left like orphans outside the fire station. Last week, my friend, Mary, dropped off some lovely forest green encyclopedias and three volumes of Century magazine indices from the 1880s. She found them by the road left for the recycling truck.
The green embossed books caught my eye first; I bet I can sell them pretty quickly. The Century indices are a boring brown, so I worried that they wouldn’t sell. But then I looked inside. Poems by Walt Whitman and Emma Lazarus. An article that looked at the statistical likelihood of getting hit by a bullet in a civil war battle. And articles by Teddy Roosevelt about life on the frontier with illustrations by Frederick Remington.
I might not sell these books.
Apt. 11d 
What a treasure! The paper in those appears to have held up well which is never a sure thing with late nineteenth century print.
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Pretty. I keep my 1892 encyclopedia brittanica as a reminder that paper outlasts bytes. 125 years old and still completely accessible, unlike the various versions of CDs and websites that contained the info 15 years ago.
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xkcd had a cartoon chart on this.
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https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1909:_Digital_Resource_Lifespan
Shock: there is now an “Explain XKCD” wiki. The discussion threads are interesting.
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Cranberry,
That’s EXACTLY what I wanted.
You know, I’m starting to see why you got mistaken for a bot.
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That’s worth money. Any edition after 1900 isn’t.
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I might come to your house to look at them. I love late 19th century media.
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The other day, I was in the reference section the library and saw “The Encyclopedia of the Internet”. It was from 2004. I assumed it was full of captioned pictures of cats andI didn’t open any of the volumes to avoid ruining my illusion.
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