The three books which formed TIME’s original library—the Bible, Xenophon’s Anabasis, and the Iliad—are still in TIME’s offices, still thumbed (Briton Hadden and Henry Luce)
Porcelain bookends, vintage books
Hadden and Luce maintained that TIME’s fact-checking represented the first innovation in news since Julius Caesar introduced acta diurna to the Roman Republic. Proud young “Yale Men” and Classics majors, they believed they were destined for equal historical greatness.
The three books which formed TIME’s original library—the Bible, Xenophon’s Anabasis, and the Iliad—are still in TIME’s offices, still thumbed presents a recreation of TIME’s first reference library. The books are flanked by tchotchke-sized porcelain busts of Hadden and Luce rendered in the style of the Tusculum bust, the only existing portrait from Caesar’s lifetime.
Early TIME records reveal Hadden and Luce aimed to “disrupt” contemporary media (the same language used by young technology start-up founders nearly a century later) and transform how information could be disseminated and, eventually, personalized.
(Contemporary “disruptor” Mark Zuckerberg is equally fascinated with these ancient emporers: he named his daughters Maxima for Maximus, August for Augustus Caesar, and Aurelia for Marcus Aurelius.)
The title of this work is lifted from a internal memo from the 1940s and demonstrates the sustained influence of these ancient texts upon the TIME’s founding mythos.