At the very beginning of this work we discussed the fact that I have been buying copies of The Watermark. I have also been buying, bartering, and hunting them, but  I would like to now expand on that statement with data about what it is exactly I have been buying, and where. 

To begin, I have been buying every available copy of The Watermark as it appears on Amazon, eBay, AbeBooks, and Biblio, with the exception of the 2 or 3 copies of Volume 23 on eBay due to what I consider to be unrealistic pricing. I have broken down the number of unique volumes held on each platform at the time of writing below, as well as the Volumes in specific:

Note, this list is very specific to the late 2025 and early 2026 time period, and does not take into account sales from past years. However, eBay does have a ‘previously sold’ function which has been valuable in confirming that I am the only one buying copies of this journal on that platform. Note however that the issues most appearing on platforms like Amazon and eBay, which are designed for quick transactional sales are our Golden Age period issues.  And platforms like Biblio and AbeBooks, which are more ‘serious’ bookseller platforms, have the older more ‘antique’ issues from the 1990s and early 2000s. 

The Watermark effectively does not exist online past the year 2015 in any capacity I have been able to find on official UMB websites, defunct magazine websites, or else 

In terms of prices I am paying, in the interest of transparency, I am not paying over $20 post shipping for any one issue. This policy would be broken only for post-2015 issues. Volume 10 on eBay cost $8.90 and $5.22 in shipping. The same volume on Amazon costs $13.95 and $4.99 in shipping. On eBay, save Volume 23, every issue came from 1 of 2 used book stores. 

One of these bookstores from eBay is in Rhode Island, and the other is in Massachusetts (but about 12 miles out of the city in another town.) For the ones on Biblio and AbeBooks, the geographic scattering is much broader, including Texas and California. In terms of Amazon listings, this geographic data is not provided but based on the accounts listed I believe they are predominantly individual seller accounts, or else small online resellers. Naturally, these are online sales only. They do not account for potential in-person sales at these stores. But we can reasonably ask ourselves; who is going to buy what appears to be a defunct literary journal for $16 in a store in Rhode Island unless they are there, specifically, looking for it. I will say that when I asked these two bookstores about their having copies of the book, this is the response I got from the Rhode Island store: “They came in a lot of items purchased a long while ago. Most likely from somewhere on the east side of Providence, near Brown.”

The other bookstore had a more in-depth answer: “One of things we buy for inventory is auction storage units, this came from a huge (300 shipping boxes) in Storage facility in Revere. Everything from WWII Paperbacks, to Bibles, to Recent fiction Advanced Readers, to textbooks. We did donate quite a few to the Prison Book Project, but I too went to UMASS (Amherst & Boston) so I may have kept this to read then sell :)”

Furthermore, while buying copies of Howth Castle, the predecessor journal of The Waterfront, it became apparent to me that not even used bookstores were exempt from listing and storage confusions based on this message I got:

Hello,

I’m the book dealer you ordered this from. I’m sorry to report that we cannot locate our copy of this journal on our shelves. We took some time yesterday attempting to hunt it down — even in all the ‘wrong’ places -- but to no avail.

I’m afraid we may have to cancel your order. I’m very sorry about this.

If it does turn up eventually I will certainly let you know. Your credit card was not charged

I have not included my analysis on how Howth Castle moved, or how other publications moved. I will say it does require a kind of alertness and consistent checking. On Amazon there was some kind of arts journal from 1995 which could have been a miscategorized copy of The Watermark, but I suspect it was an entirely lost publication that was bought before I could get it, and now I do not know where it is. It is odd and concerning that the entire preservation effort of student culture hinges on one grad student being paid biweekly, budgeting out funds for groceries, and for this. 

And, although I know and respect that Archives are chronically underfunded and understaffed, and that they already have copies of Golden Age publications and every other copy I’ve found online, does The University of Massachusetts Boston not have $8.90 plus shipping to spare for preserving cultural output? Or, does the university have that $8.90, and the ability to scale it up, but no structural desire to preserve student culture when compared to something more in line with academic couture? 

What is most likely is that current archival policy mandates donors come to them, instead of them going to potential donors. For example, based on a passing aside given from an anonymous worker at the Special Collections portion of the archive, I learned that digitization efforts stopped because the Editors-in-Chief of The Watermark stopped bringing in copies and no one from the archive investigated, which supports the theory that their collection policy centers donor agency. That, or else they do go to donors for certain texts and have decided;

Now the point has been reached where I am the only confirmed holder of a number of copies, and these copies are the only confirmed copy left. I have begun to investigate the possibility of buying my own digitization machine over the summer of 2026 so I can build out an online repository combining the ScholarWorks digitized copies with my own, but this is tentative. Should I, however reluctantly, donate my copies to the Archive there is no guarantee they will be digitized, or even done so in a reasonable time, just due to priority mismatches and time constraints on their end. One must wonder if they will, once our timelines align, recognize in 2054 (the 100th anniversary of UMass Boston’s founding) what I have been saying in 2026 and find themselves too late, the work done, myself gone from the region, and the rest of the books dispersed.