Clever Nineteenth Century German Predicts the Advent of First Things Online

Kristin Parker, an archivist for Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, recently shared this snippet of a letter Gardner received from novelist F. Marion Crawford on August 23, 1896:

The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it? . . . A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas of men of genius—over the everlasting telephone of course—published every morning for the whole world.

We publish on the Internet rather than using an everlasting telephone, but otherwise this is a spot on description of First Things Online , wouldn’t you say?

(Via: Kottke )