A future electronic book. from F. W. Lancaster, Libraries and Librarians in an Age of Electronics, 1982 p.60.

Future terminal, from F. W. Lancaster, Libraries and Librarians in an Age of Electronics, 1982 p.81.

“Consumersole,” from F. W. Lancaster, Libraries and Librarians in an Age of Electronics, 1982 p.80.

I have been skimming over a lot of books and articles as I plan out a new project that has to do with the history of the future of libraries–that is the way library-types have written about the future over the past 100+ years.

My eventual project (I’m calling it a “project” because I don’t really have a plan as to what the product will look like. Not a book, almost certainly) will likely deal with pre-digital visions of the future. So much has been written in the last forty years about the library and the network, that I don’t really have the desire to cover it all. Besides, I’m more excited by visions of the library with an airplane landing strip on the roof and entire libraries of microcards.

But I have still pulled out a few books on the library of the future as seen from circa 1980, and I wanted to share these three illustrations from F.W. Lancaster’s 1982 book, Libraries and Librarians in an Age of Electronics. Please click to embiggen, especially the last one, the “Consumersole.” I totally want one of those.