Book review: Front pages of New York Times compiled, elegantly

@SL_body_copy_ragged:Hey, you. Yeah, you there, skimming the Drudge Report, reading your RSS feed of Yahoo! News on your BlackBerry, trolling through the video clips on YouTube. You're a news junkie for the 21st century. Congratulations.

But on the day Barack Obama was elected president, what did so many souvenir-hunters turn to? A screen grab of the top of Google News? Don't think so. For posterity, they sought out a copy of a newspaper — and, in particular, an archival copy of The New York Times.

With the publishing of this stunning volume of the most momentous front pages of the past 150 years, accompanied by DVDs with images of every single Times front page ever published, a sprawling snapshot of human civilization — at least civilization as Americans saw it — is at our fingertips.

It would be easy to say that this book is for older generations, people who read newspapers and now want them compiled into a shiny coffee-table book. But the real use of "The Complete Front Pages" is actually webby: It's a primary source, offered both in print and an online-friendly format, that will immerse you in contemporaneous stuff about history on your own rather than rely on modern reinterpretations.

We see the world through a glass, darkly, the saying goes. And perhaps the mainstream media, as so many bloggers assert, is indeed a camera obscura. But these contemporary accounts of what we thought was important at the time — now suspended, like us, in an information age between a huge coffee-table book and equally elegant PDF files on disc — are a gratifying treasure trove for any news junkie.

They are a shining, well-preserved example of what one wise journalist, former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, once called "the first rough draft of a history that can never be completed about a world we can never understand." The history remains incomplete, but "The Complete Front Pages" offers a chance at capturing some of the understanding, if only for a fleeting moment.

— AP