Introductory

This blog will be a place where I can display, and interpret, all of the altered pulp magazine and comic book covers that I have created over the last few years.  I am a working, "old school" archivist who arranges and describes three-dimensional, information-bearing objects.  To put it another way, I analyze and interpret documents and photographs to create inventories that assist historians, genealogists, and other interested parties in finding them.  When I first started in the business in 1987, computers were just starting to take over the world and Al Gore had yet to invent the internet.  I learned a way to describe materials in large groups, called "series," and create finding aids that would point to relevant materials in the most general way, usually by listing folder titles found within individually numbered boxes.

But something happened over the last twenty-seven years, and I am not convinced it is a good thing.  Desktop computers, and the networking of the same through the internet, has turned my profession upside down.  No longer are people content to actually read a finding aid inventory, they now demand to see relevant documents on screen, just like the latest YouTube cat video or their friend's Facebook postings.  This has forced archivists like me from the previous generation to begin slowing down our traditional work to satisfy an endless stream of requests for individual images, and trying to meet these demands by the millennial generation is much like feeding peanuts to pigeons from a park bench; they will never be satisfied. 

To vent my frustration at this situation, and to whine endlessly about what I see as the demise of deep reading and literacy to be found among the millennials, I began altering magazine covers to reflect my angst.  This blog will allow those covers to be viewed by the same people I am mocking, and the irony of using the internet to complain about technology is certainly not lost on me.  So, without further ado, here is the first cover I ever created to point out the tensions between the traditional practice of my profession, and the unsavory developments that are altering it, and society, forever.