Now this....THIS is an almanac.
In 1922, rival publishers Henry Luce and Briton Haddon joined forces to create a new magazine. Originally called Facts, Luce and Haddon decided that Time would be a snappier title. A radical departure from typical men's magazines of the day, Time eschewed stodgy, verbose prose for a more concise, compact style to be read by businessmen on the go.
In 1927, the periodical launched its Man (Person since 1999) of the Year issue. Charles Lindbergh was the first; as of 2017, the title is held in a group effort by people who have submitted essays speaking out against sexual abuse and harassment.
Time is still immediately recognizable on newsstands with its broad red border and red "TIME" logo.
In 1997, Time merged with the Information Please almanac; the result was Time Almanac with Information Please.
Which brings us to this present article.
Much of this almanac consists of your usual facts, figures, and statistics. Sports, consumer resources, famous people, flags of all nations, news of 1998 and 1999...it's all there. But, we're not here to prattle on about all that! I'd have started The Facts and Figures Museum if I wanted to go on at length about the contents of an almanac.
The most interesting stuff is found right at the beginning. Essayist Lance Morrow (b. 1939) wrote the Millennium section, entitled "An Appointment with the Future."
It begins like this:
"The millennium is the comet that crosses the calendar every thousand years. It throws off metaphysical sparks. It promises a new age, or an apocalypse. It is a magic trick that time performs, extracting a millisecond from its eternal flatness and then, poised on that transitional instant, projecting a sort of hologram that teems with the summarized life of the thousand years just passed and with visions of the thousand now to come."In the first chapter, Morrow makes the case that the millennium is strictly an arbitrary marker, a way of structuring time in much the same way that we structure money. One hundred pennies is a dollar; therefore, one penny is one one-hundredth of a dollar. A nickel is a fifth of a dollar; a dime, a tenth; a quarter, one-fourth. Thus, one year is a thousandth of a millennium; a decade, one-tenth, and so on and so forth. "It does not depend on objective calculation, but entirely on what people bring to it...essentially an event of the imagination."
That being said, this particular millennium bears more weight: the "Year 2000" has long been used "as a projected launch platform for humankind's most ambitious, far-reaching projects...the Year One of a better age, the decisive border at which the Future would start." A lot of older science-fiction stories and comic strips took place within the year 2000 or beyond, and their visions of tomorrow included moon-bases, interstellar travel, and dreams of life beyond humanity's petty differences. (I think Star Wars was one of the first modern science-fiction examples to buck the trend of Earth's future, by positing that its story took place "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...")
The words "Year 2000" evoke dreams of a wondrous future, but the word "Millennium" evokes apocalyptic nightmares. "In the past quarter-century millennial visions have grown darker, lurid as a Brueghel." The three-season television series Millennium and the movie End of Days, both of which I have covered within the Museum, have touched upon this, but Lance Morrow presents the genesis of this darker vision in two books: The Late, Great Planet Earth, a book by Christian author Hal Lindsey, and in John F. Walvoord's Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis. Both volumes examined the End Times through the lens of the Book of Revelations, with Jesus coming from the heavens "to preside over the real New World Order." (Perhaps I'll cover these later.)
Still, Morrow ends his essay on an upbeat note: "Envisioning the end of one era and the beginning of another somehow infuses life with narrative meaning. And surviving the millennial passage, for those who do, may even have about it a wistful savor of the afterlife."
Immediately after this wonderful essay, there's a subsection: "When does the Next Millennium Officially Begin?"
It successfully makes the case that the millennium ought to begin in 2001, as 1 C.E. technically marks the beginning of the First Millennium, but also states that the allure of "three zeroes" is far, far too appealing.
Finally, there's a section on Y2K.
Oh, no, not you again. God save us...
I've got another volume on the Y2K stuff, and I'll be going over that in more detail. There's nothing in the almanac which doesn't say what the other book will say.
'Till then, cheers!
1 https://collectingoldmagazines.com/magazines/time-magazine/
2 https://www.trivia-library.com/c/history-of-time-magazine-part-1.htm
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