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"I'm a fairly visual thinker. In doing science, I think in terms of pictures of things happening, and then do the mathematics."
- Gregory Benford

Automatic Delivery Library  
  A library able to deliver any volume within a few moments.  

Everyone with piles of books around the house would really like to have one of these.

"Knock you cold? Kidnap you? Circus costume?" repeated the dictator, with a puzzled expression. "I do not know those words. They have a very queer antique sound. If you will excuse me, I shall investigate."

While his visitors looked on with wide, gaping eyes he pressed a lettered button that stood with hundreds of others on a dial at one end of the room. A few seconds passed in silence; then a panel on the wall rattled open, and a huge volume slid in through a pneumatic tube and arranged itself neatly on a table.

"This dictionary isn't exactly up-to-the-minute," remarked Spratt, as he thumbed through the thousands of pages. "It dates back to the late twenty-four twenties. ... Ah, here we are. 'Kidnap. Obsolete. To steal bodily. Refers to a barbarous practice of the Ages of Confusion, no case of which has been known for over three hundred years."

Technovelgy from The Lord of Tranerica, by Stanton A. Coblentz.
Published by Dynamic Science Stories in 1939
Additional resources -

Compare to the universal dictionary from The Star Beast (1954) by Robert Heinlein and the robot librarian filer from The Robot Who Wanted to Know (1962) by Harry Harrison.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Lord of Tranerica
  More Ideas and Technology by Stanton A. Coblentz
  Tech news articles related to The Lord of Tranerica
  Tech news articles related to works by Stanton A. Coblentz

Automatic Delivery Library-related news articles:
  - The Library Of The Future

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