Magazines in their great age, before they were unmoored from their spines and digitally picked apart, before perpetual blogging made them permeable packages, changing mood at every hour and up all night like colicky infants—magazines were expected to be magisterial registers of the passing scene. Yet, though they were in principle temporal, a few became dateless, timeless. The proof of this condition was that they piled up, remorselessly, in garages and basements, to be read . . . later.

When I was a child, two piles of magazines, pillars of this misplaced faith in a leisurely reading future, rose in adjacent basements. In our house, Scientific American, dense with Feynman diagrams and unplayed mathematical games, accumulated, month after month; in my grandparents’, it was National Geographic, yellow-bordered, and with a bright, unpredictable photograph—as likely an Afghan child as a space shuttle—on its cover. Though occasionally the Scientific American pile got upturned by an eleven-year-old searching for science-project material, as far as I could tell the National Geographic pile was never disturbed by its owners, and was there merely to ascend, ever higher. At times, down with measles or mumps, I would leaf through the issues, a little hypnotized; I recall being stopped once by an illustration of what had happened in an Alaskan earthquake, with an entire family, openmouthed, suddenly divided, on either side of a gaping split in their otherwise normal street, the drawing made more frightening by being so densely illustrative, detailed and unlurid—merely inspecting this alarming nation, merely geographic.

Both magazines were American institutions, and both partook of that essentially timeless, month-to-month rhythm—the December, 1967, issue of Sci Am, say, resembled the September, 1973, issue more than 1967 resembled 1973. Read today, they also bear the quiet imprint of their times. The July, 1975, issue of National Geographic seems mostly about itself and its own preoccupations. With Nixon out and Carter on his way, and the horror of Vietnam just over, the cover lines promise pieces on Ben Franklin, Ozark woodcarvers, and whistling swans, and yet it’s also about the moment it was made. The way Ben Franklin feels so purposefully predictive of the bicentennial, the way the Ozark woodcarvers in 1975 belong more to a receding artisanal American past than to the Ozarks, the ads with their shrinking cars and the slightly blue tinge of the Ektachrome film stock: the issue becomes a period piece, even though not meant to be about its period.

National Geographic endures as an empire, a yellow rectangle on the screen of a cable channel having replaced the pillar of yellowed magazines as the prime repository of its existence. Those pillars must still grow in garages, but they have a more legendary existence, like the vines covering the Machu Picchu ruins (which the National Geographic Society was the first to publish and exploit). Having been provided not long ago with a set of DVDs of all the back issues—a hundred and twenty-three years’ worth—I decided to forage once again among the magazines in my grandparents’ basement. The DVD catches and groans, but beneath it I can still hear the dehumidifier humming, and feel the nubbly carpet under my legs, as the pile diminishes at last.

What was National Geographic? It was, and remains, the main journal of the National Geographic Society. You don’t just subscribe; you join. The Society began, in 1888, as an impressively close-knit group of exploration-minded do-gooders, each with a view of the white man’s burden, and three names. (Robert M. Poole, in his “Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made,” gives a good account of the early years.) Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a founder, was succeeded as president by his son-in-law, Alexander Graham Bell—yes, that one—who was succeeded by his son-in-law, Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, who ruled until 1954, and who is generally considered, in the surprisingly large and contentious academic literature devoted to the journal, to have given the thing its style and imprint.

Every magazine is addressed to a readership for whom what the magazine presents as attained is in truth aspirational: Seventeen is read by twelve-year-olds, and no playboy has ever read Playboy. The explicit goal of the National Geographic Society, and of its house journal, was to show the world to the worldly, to enlarge the map, to support exploration with grants and medals. But the real task of National Geographic was to show white people who rarely got far from Cincinnati or San Francisco what lay beyond their ken. Those contentious academics go farther, insisting that the magazine’s agenda was to show readers where America stood in the great maw of geological time and in the great chain of creation, and to reassure them that they stood at the top of both.

As I leafed, or anyway clicked, through the issues, a more specific expedition came to mind: to traverse the year 1913, page by page, and ad by ad, and see what images and lore are found. This was doubly enticing: first, because our possession of ten fingers makes centuries auspicious, and, second, because 1913 was itself so portentous—the last year when the optimistic, forward-looking, progressive civilization that National Geographic represented was so entirely sure of itself. “Never such innocence again,” Philip Larkin wrote of that prewar moment. Are there fine veins of faults in the teacup that precede its cracking? What images do we see in 1913 when National Geographic looks at the world, what ghostly heralds of the catastrophe to come? What’s in the world?

Well, bugs and muskrats. Or, at least, more of them than you might expect. The issues in that fateful year move from heights to depths, from Indiana Jones to the Wind in the Willows. One month, we are in those newly discovered ruins of Machu Picchu, with its vine-cleared Temple of the Three Windows, still one of the truly mysterious human sites. The next, among small woodland animals that “took their own photographs,” as they tripped cunningly set wires in someone’s back yard: that’s when the muskrat appears, guiltily clutching a garden carrot in its mouth. A later caption informs readers, “A few days after it died, probably as a result of its carrot debauch.”

In a piece with a similar inspiration, back-yard insects are viewed, microscopically, as bug-eyed monsters. (The science-fiction writers of the nineteen-forties must have seen them here first.) Every lighthouse in America is inspected—did you know that the brightest one in the world was once the Navesink light, in New Jersey, illuminating New York Bay?—and a long piece examines the parasitic theory of cancer, with photographs of diseased plants and flowers.

An adjoining report on visiting Burma is written in the style that the then nine-year-old S. J. Perelman made it his life’s mission to burlesque: