Newspapers may be dying. Libraries may be struggling. We may be getting dumber. But the archive lives on.
The endlessly fascinating Refractal engages in a scavanger hunt among the treasures of digitized archives. Though Increasingly available on the internet, it takes a true cybernaut, an explorer with dusty boots and quick wit, to venture into the depths of these archives, seeking information few eyes have ever seen. Thanks to the internet and Refractal, the treasures are now laid out on a silver plate:
Miss Frank E Buttolph’s legacy truly does grace those epicurean cybernauts who wish to move from place to place, smelling the tables of the past. Her collection of over 9,000 menus from the years 1880-1910 have been published in an online database by the New York Public Library (constituting the largest collection of historical menus in the world). So comprehensive was the collection that an author profiling Miss Buttolph for a 1906 edition of the New York Times magazine wrote:
“Miss Buttolph is making history for the year 2000 which, should our present carnivorous natures by that time merge into a diet of mild and milky, will hold this generation up as an example of brute force that should annihilate all our virtues and leave us in the eyes of our descendants a race of horror and greed, a pack of flesh-eating outcasts remarkable only for our gastronomic endurance. (((wow, if only the NYT still wrote sentences like that))) [1906 New York Times Profile of Miss Buttolph PDF]
(The menu from the Hotel Manhattan, my favorite for its pure banality, is astounding.)
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