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by coroxout 2711 days ago
"Ted Nelson kept all his junk mail, for some reason"

I'm glad he did, I love the design on a lot of these!

Reminds me of the story of the John Johnson collection of "printed ephemera" at a library in my town: https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/johnson/about

The way I've heard it, he was in Egypt studying the writing on papyrus fragments which had been excavated from a seam of ancient landfill, and he reflected on how much he'd learned about the real day-to-day lives of ancient Egypt from what had been thrown away as scrap paper millennia before, and wondered what people were doing in our age to preserve the modern-day equivalents.

(Or modern-day-ish - this was the 1920s)

I love archive.org and have "lost" many an evening flicking through some early-80s computer magazines or consumer electronics catalogues.