I Found A "Time" Capsule At Work

As strange as that title is, it's more or less what I found. A fifty year old "Time" capsule. I was putting away some magazines when I found this shelved in with the Time Magazines (all for the current issue):

It's a Time Magazine all right, but it's dated from August 16, 1963. All I can think of is that a customer must have left it there. I brought it home out of curiosity about what was written up for that week. It's kind of neat, even just looking at the ads - for example, cigarette ads are everywhere in the magazine, even the back cover. Today that would be absolutely unthinkable.

Interesting tidbits from the magazine:

• A blurb for The Great Escape under the cinema listings. I guess the movie must have just been released around that date.
• None of the bestsellers are at all familiar, at least to me.
• The big piece of news for the USA is the signing of a nuclear test ban between the US and Russia. This was the time of the Cold War at it's height, or so I've been told
• Part of an article about the end of segregation (or so I'm guessing. There's a page missing, and this is the end of the article)

Although the layout of the magazine doesn't seem to have changed much in the past fifty years, the writing style certainly has. And also the content. Much of the magazine covers personal stories as news and is very revealing as to how much society has changed over the intervening decades. For example, in the World Business section, Asia is subtitled "The Mysterious East".

I'm definitely finding that reading over this magazine has been both hilarious at times and an interesting snapshot on the events and attitudes of that time.

 The bestellers for the week of August 16, 1963:
Fiction

1. The Shoes of the Fisherman, Morris L. West
2. Elizabeth Appleton, John O'Hara
3. City of Night, John Rechy
4. The Glass-Blowers, Daphne Du Maurier
5. Grandmother and the Priests, Taylor Caldwell
6. Seven Days In May, Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey
7. The Concubine, Norah Lofts
8. Raise High The Roof Beam, J. D. Salinger
9. The Bedford Incident, Mark Rascovich
10. The Collector, John Fowles

Non Fiction

1. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
2. I Owe Russia $1,200, Bob Hope
3. The Whole Truth And Nothing But, Hedda Hopper
4. The Day They Shook The Plum Tree, Arthur H. Lewis
5. My Darling Clementine, Jack Fishman
6. Terrible Swift Sword, Bruce Catton
7. Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck
8. Forgotten Pioneer, Harry Golden
9. The Wine Is Bitter, Milton Stover Eisenhower
10. A Man Named John, Alden Hatch

Although I'm not familiar with most of these books, I was surprised to recognize some of the authors. I've read a couple of Taylor Caldwell's books and enjoyed them. And, who hasn't heard of John Steinbeck or J. D. Salinger?

Definitely this was a neat find - and takes the cake for the weirdest thing I've found left in the store to date.