Worth the subscription

Nothing from the May issue of Harper's is up yet, and I'm not sure how much is ever available on line without some sort of sign-in, but everybody I pass it on to loves the letter from San Francisco ("A World in Three Aisles," byline Gideon Lewis-Kraus), about the Prelinger Library and lots more. The illustrations repay scrutiny, too; they're images from the library in bands across the pages, some commercial art, some title pages, some diagrams. Some of these publications are deaccessioned library items and still carry the old-fashioned pinprick-style marks of library ownership, rather than a stamp imprint of the library name. One of the library books is What I Have Done with Birds, by Gene Stratton Porter, an author who was a best-seller and whose books stood in ranks on library and other bookshelves. I liked the image of a promotion for Space Food Sticks. They used to make delicious snacks when we went tent-camping. I don't know when (or if) they were discontinued (I see that they're supposedly available, or at least some version of them), but I liked the chocolate ones in their day. Also discussed in the article are the Internet Archive and how a trove of industrial and instructional film (so-called ephemeral films) came to be preserved.