The Paris Review goes way, way back: In a recent blog post, Dan Piepenbring shares a link to the original website of The Paris Review, via the Wayback Machine. The site features two grainy introductory videos by late Review editor George Plimpton, who encourages visitors to "find out something about this magazine by pulling it up on a computer."
CutBank dug up a few more early incarnations of literary journal and magazine websites. Here's the New York Review of Books circa 1998, Tin House circa 2001, The Atlantic circa 1999, and The Kenyon Review circa 1998. And, in the interest of humility, our website circa 2007.
While we're on web design... A recent redesign for The New York Times website eliminated pagination for The Grey Lady's online content. In an essay at The New Republic (that is also, as the author notes, something of a humble brag), Marc Tracy writes that "the Internet is abandoning the pagebreak—and, with it, revealing some truths about how online media works." Tracy spoke with Ian Adelman, who oversees the Times' digital design and was Slate's art director when the site launched more than 15 years ago. Adelman tells Tracy that some sites paginated content because, in the age of 28.8 modems, "you might not be able to load all that content all at once." Read Tracy's story here.
Ex libris, etc: After we recently found a few bookplates in our basement, we wondered: How did authors mark the covers of their prized texts? Here, a collection of nearly three-dozen bookplates from the treasured texts of the likes of Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, Maurice Sendak (a dog with a mop!), and Lewis Carroll—from whom we would never consider stealing a book.