So, the county library system used shelving at the back of the main room to store bound volumes of several magazines. Some of those bound volumes dated back to the turn of the century (19th). Among those were Scientific American and Popular Mechanics.
It was also the only air-conditioned public building in the town, so I spent hours and hours there on hot summer days. Over a couple of summers, I paged through every volume of those two magazines, starting with the earliest volumes. I read some articles, but not all. Still, I got exposed to the development of science and technology through about 75 years.
The head librarian once asked me why I was looking through all those old magazines. "History," I said. "I'm learning the history of things that interest me." I didn't realize it at the time, but that history taught me a great deal that became useful later in my life.
Today, one can browse through such collections on the Internet, but it's not as much fun as it was paging through those old pages. the advertising, too, in those old magazines also taught me a lot.
That librarian was a nice man, but he was sometimes puzzled by my choices of books, as well. I read in almost any subject you could imagine, and he didn't quite get what I was up to.
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