Including a history of urology from 3,200 BC to the present day; an archive of Amazing Stories magazine; some dramatic downward motion; and a museum of fossilised dinosaur faeces. With gift shop, obviously.
Including a history of urology from 3,200 BC to the present day; an archive of Amazing Stories magazine; some dramatic downward motion; and a museum of fossilised dinosaur faeces. With gift shop, obviously.
Before modern conveniences…
Salt was used quite a bit for preservation.
Dino burgers sounds quite nummy…
For an, ahem, interesting read, look at the Amazing Stories issues from the mid 1940s. Richard Shaver wrote some letters to Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer about ancient aliens who lived in underground cavern cities, and tortured humans as a sideline in a war between the two groups of aliens-the Teros (the good guys) and the Deros (the sadistic bad guys). Palmer rewrote Shaver’s letters as stories and then published them in Amazing Stories-I think eventually Shaver stopped writing letters and started writing stories himself for publication. Although an editor and sometime science fiction writer, Palmer was no great shakes at writing, but his stuff was better than Shaver’s. For a few years Palmer ran the Shaver Mystery stories, with a campaign that suggested to the more gullible readers that Shaver’s fantasies were true. This, as was intended by Palmer, led to extended debates in his Magazine’s letter column and in the nuttier precincts of science fiction fandom, and greatly increased the circulation of Amazing Stories for a time. The letter column discussions and Palmer’s “Shaver Mystery” columns and editorials are entertaining in a PT Barnum sort of way. The relevant issues of AS are identified in the Wiki article on Shaver and his Mystery. That Wiki article also provides a good background and details of Shaver, Palmer, etc., albeit it credits Shaver and the Mystery far too much, IMHO, for influencing the development of science fiction.
Eventually Shaver moved on from the Shaver Mystery to rock books; he claimed to have discovered certain rocks that contained histories of ancient aliens (apparently Earth was a regular stopover for aliens or something- this was a different group from the Teros and Deros) that only Shaver could read. Unfortunately for Shaver, either rock books didn’t have the appeal of the Shaver Mystery or the market was no longer gullible enough-or maybe he just couldn’t compete with Dianetics and other SF fads (remember the Dean Drive), and so he faded away into obscurity. Although there apparently are some artists who admire Shaver’s paintings and photos of his rock books, and exhibitions of them have been held at art galleries and museums.
After the winding down of the Shaver Mystery tanked Amazing Stories’ circulation, Palmer moved on to UFOology and Flying Saucers and dominated that market, for a time, in the 50s.
Amazing Stories is also a place to find the occasional pretty good story written by writers who either never would be or who weren’t quite yet good enough or well enough known to command the rates paid by the better magazines. During the heyday of science fiction magazines (beginning in maybe the late 30s when John Campbell Jr. took over as editor of Astounding/Analog, continuing through the great expansion of the late 40s and 50s with the emergence of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Magazine and Worlds of If Science Fiction as the class examples of the genre together with Campbell’s mag, and probably beginning its decline in the late 60s or 70s as other outlets like paperback books began to crowd out the ‘zines), there were lots of pretty good writers who wrote only occasionally for the SF Magazines, some because they had other things to do or couldn’t make a living at it, and some (John D. McDonald for one) because their work in other genres sold better.
Anyway, for fans of older science fiction, particularly the golden age guys like Bob Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, Leigh Blackett, and so on—take a look at the old magazines like AS, the Magazine of F&SF, Galaxy. Astounding/Analog, and Worlds of If. You might find a gem heretofore unknown to you by an author you like, or even one by an author you never heard of..lots of the pulp authors wrote stories rather than novels for reasons of efficiency and economics, and if their magazine stories weren’t reprinted in anthologies or collections they are mostly unknown to the modern audience. For mostly story writers who seem to be more obscure than they deserve, for a start I’d recommend stories written by William Tenn, Avram Davidson, Cyril Kornbluth, James Schmitz, Robert Sheckley, L.Sprague deCamp and Fletcher Pratt in collaboration, and H. Beam Piper.