Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914

The last issue before everything changed. Published July 1, 1914, this Punch captures Edwardian Britain in its final summer of peace: motor cars and hand-laundries, theater reviews and royal sketches, poems mourning lost trades and witty commentary on a world that didn't know what was coming. The humor is sharp, the cartoons are brilliant, and there's an almost unbearable poignancy in reading the jokes of people who had no idea their world was about to end. This was Punch at its peak: the weekly that defined British wit, where the finest illustrators and writers of the age held a mirror to society's follies. This particular issue reads like a time capsule of the last moment before the old world burned. It's for readers who understand that sometimes the most revealing historical documents aren't the solemn ones, they're the jokes, the cartoons, the light verse a nation was reading the week before the war began.