From the Editor’s Desk
7
Then and Now
Then: December 1989, Volume 1 of Popular Culture Review was bom. It
doesn’t seem so long ago, does it? But that was 20 years ago. That first year was
a single edition, with the stated intent of becoming a two-volume series. The
cover art was a stylized ink drawing of The Flashlight, a metal sculpture by
Claes Oldenburg which still sits in the middle of the plaza between Artemis
Ham Hall and Judy Bayley Theatre on the campus of UNLV.
It was requested that articles be submitted . . . in duplicate . . . double
spaced . . . by m ail. . . with a self-addressed stamped envelope. Query letters
were requested in order to approve anything over 16 pages in length. All
correspondence was directed to a street address. If any contributors, or editors,
had an email address, no one thought to include it.
Over time, instead of printed copy, a floppy disk might have been sent.
Then, floppies with 1.22Mb of memory, able to hold whole books of
information, seemed to possess an enormous storage capability, a storage media
that we could never fill up. In 2004, when the assistant torch was handed over to
Amie Norris and me, we had data on a few floppies, a sheaf of paper, and