You are currently (to me not to you) sitting in a room filled to the ceiling with Strand Magazines
We love Strand Magazines; they are a bit like a rehydrate-able nineteenth century, a freeze-dried British Empire. The first issue dates from 1891, and it ran in various formats until 1950. It was responsible for the release into the wild of Sherlock Holmes (duh!), Raffles (accomplished gentleman thief and, to my mind, entertaining pervert), a bit of Jules Verne, a spot of Agatha Christie, a tiny shred of William Hope Hodgson, a metric shit-tonne of H.G.Wells, E Phillips Oppenheim, G.K. Chesterton and a myriad others. It nurtured, entertained and critiqued us through two world wars and nearly made it to four monarchs.
It made Conan Doyle a household name and introduced us to roller skating to the South Coast, stilt racing across France, the memoirs of Sara Bernhardt, the sky-train of the future and the ins and outs of the Kaiser's fleet. It was also packed to the straining covers with advertisements for all manner of products; from Bile Beans to shorthand courses to build your own Edison Phonograph to which shotgun you should take with you up the Zambezi. It is also a must for anyone with a corsetry fetish (and who doesn't have one of those?) and a secret predilection for sock suspenders. They are things of beauty every one and the closest that we, with our lack of arcane technological knowledge, will come to time-travel.
Unless...we get this man a working reproduction of Babbage's Difference Engine, couple it up to something James Cameron might use to make home movies; plug the whole thing into a Large Hadron Collider (I have one here somewhere, where is it...ah, under the first edition Story of O and the Gorey Dracula Theatre) and then I stand next to the whole wobbling, steaming contraption in a top hat feeding random pages from the Strand into it until it gives birth to a giant replica nineteenth century which we can then visit on holiday and possibly rent out to people for weddings, funerals and orgies.
I think we're on to something...if I can just stop reading them, stroking them and rolling naked in heaps of them I could make millions!
ahem...
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