
It’s rained the past two Sundays, but it wasn’t raining when I started my bike ride, so I just accepted that I’d probably get wet on the way home, which I did.
But today it had been raining since before 4 am, so I didn’t do the regular ride. Instead, I thought I’d finally start cleaning the basement.
I’d start by clearing some shelves of books I never look at. I started with a stack of old bound Harper’s and The Atlantic Magazines from the 1860’s that came from a library sale. It’s fascinating to go back and read first-hand accounts from those years. In addition to the history, some articles were written by famous people from those times. One notable example is Charles Darwin writing about The Origin of Species when it was published.
Anyway, I started thumbing through one of the Harpers and that was as far as I got with my plan to clean the basement. I came across and illustrated article titled “Tour of Arizona” that had hand drawn pictures of places I spent a lot of time at when I lived in Tucson. It was all memory lane from there.
The pictures are captioned, so you can read a bit as you browse them. Warning, a few of them are disturbing.
Not sure how interesting this will be for those who haven’t spent time in Arizona, but people who have will likely find it fascinating.
A side note relating to how much things have changed since 1864, and even 2004, I started taking pictures of the illustrations with my phone, then realized I could just find the articles in Harper’s archive and take screen shots. What’ll they think of next?