Steve Carper's Sites
I'm a historian and a book collector. I create websites about lost history and forgotten books.
Here's a convenient guide.
I collect humor. Obsessively. Books of humor, about humor, examining humor, anthologizing humor, honoring humor. Books written to make people laugh, to tell the stories of the people who make others laugh, to study what makes people laugh. Books by and about the great names in the field, plus hundreds of lesser names and names who have been utterly forgotten. I have a literal library’s worth of humor, thousands of books, bookcases up to the ceiling and under windows and tucked into closets.
Those shelves house many humorists that once were bestsellers, the biggest names of their day, yet are almost totally forgotten today. I'm bringing them back to life on my latest website. And I couldn't help adding some history about fun oddities from collection.
The Visionaries, Madmen, and Tinkerers Who Created the Future That Never Was
About 200 articles chronicle some of the myriad ways people in the past viewed the future, no , the capital "F" Future. The past tells a story about technology and the faith that people had that a better Future was just around the corner.
Articles about Flying Cars, yes, and Food Pills as well. And Ray Guns and Robots and Rockets. Lots on the Science Fiction that took these visions and fed them back in astounding, amazing, and marvelous ways. A guide to all the silent SF and Fantasy movies available on YouTube. All my robot articles that appeared on the Black Gate website. My rediscovery of the first black superhero, Bungleton Green, written and drawn by Jay Jackson. Retrofuturist pictures galore.
Pages here are dedicated to robots in all shapes and forms, along with androids, cyborgs, humanoids, replicants, mechanical men and women, and the thousands other creations of fertile minds. Inside you''ll find over 300 images, movie and television clips, and music videos that will bring the text of my book, Robots in American Popular Culture, to life.
The entire site is done in Roboto font.
I own what may be the best collection of Gnome Books books and associational items. Gnome, the most successful and influential of all the small science fiction presses established after World War II, published 86 titles. To a true collector that's just the beginning. Gnome also published another 70 variant editions, of which I have about 60. No bibliography of the line existed and hundreds of bibliographic mysteries lurked behind the loud 1950s covers. I spent many years trying to work through them, piecing together bits of information that had never been put together. The result was a full page on each title, with information on every variant. I added a history of the firm and a history of the genre up to that point. And much much more. Nothing else like it exists.
