Portals: The History of the Future

Our upcoming exhibition, Portals: The History of the Future, will highlight the material trails left by the people of the past as they looked to the future. It will include imaginative visions of futures that never came to pass, illustrations of fantastical contraptions, reflections on the nature of time, and other artifacts testifying to a human desire to visit eras besides our own. Visitors to the exhibition can view popular scientific magazines from the 1800s, a first edition of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (on loan from Brown University’s John Hay Library), a magicians’ supply catalog, a 1936 pulp science fiction magazine containing a story by H.P. Lovecraft, and plans for Utopian communities, among many other historical items.

The exhibition will be on display in the Rhode Island Room on the first floor of the library from March 3 – June 28, 2016. It can be viewed any time during the library’s regular open hours.