The Archeology of A Bookshelf

This essay was first published here on Esoterica Magazine. In the interest of building a coherent publication history on a website about publication histories  originally, it was a submission to Marginalia Review of Books. While they liked the pitch, they did not like the execution. I have included it here because it breaks down structurally how the shelving system functioned in the graduate lounge of the UMass Boston English Department in a way that is coherent. The project mentioned in it, The Sixth Floor Archive no longer exists as a physical collection of books, but the website is still active. 

Introduction

A college campus is, inherently, a kind of manuscript culture in spirit if not perfect form. This is especially true of English departments, where books are accumulated at a shocking rate from a number of vectors. Print output is amplified in part by if that campus also has a Masters of Fine Arts program that encourages and demands micropress production and student publications. The department becomes a closed ecosystem, culturally isolated, that creates a constant influx of fragile, small-run materials. At the same time, a lack of formal mechanisms for preserving what circulates through it means that extinction is the norm.

Most items vanish through neglect, dispersal, or disposal long before they can be recognized as part of a local literary history. The same logic that governs rare manuscripts can also be applied to student publications. Few are made, at great cost to the maker, distributed haphazardly, and vanish save for a few copies preserved more by luck than design. The following essay is an account of my multi-week journey clearing out a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in search of the rare, obscure, and unusual book. One would be justified in asking, why do this?

The answer is, because these books deserve to be remembered and archived. Logic dictates that, should we wait to be told what is worth preserving, the window for preservation will most likely have closed. Students, who have the most unfettered access to their department lounges and spaces, can do preservation work themselves at remarkably little cost. The cleaning of a bookshelf in an English department graduate lounge can be seen then as a kind of archaeological preservation and cultural ethnography.

Part 1: The Graduate Lounge

The Graduate Lounge on the 6th Floor of my campus is a space for ghosts. Everyone in the lounge who I have seen there, sometimes the same faces almost daily, will glance at the bookshelf inside of it, and then move on with their lives. Occasionally, someone will do a once-over and grab a title that is well-known, a Hemingway or an Updike. Then they put it back, and go back to gossip, classwork, (loving) peer harassment, or else just lounging. It existed before my arrival in the fall of 2024, and it will exist after it, although I am sure in an altered state. This is because I have meticulously mined and analyzed it, and the books, once identified, are cataloged for later sorting. For example, let’s look at the following book:

TAG: OOC was a zine made in 2015 by a number of then-current students, with grateful support from one of the MFA professors. It was a book dedicated to both Jane Austen work, as well as Harry Potter fan fiction and was full of mid 2000’s internet meme culture references and poetry. Everything about it was handmade from the cover art to the binding.

This book from 2015 had been living on the shelf since 2015, a decade by now at the time of writing, wedged on top of a stack of official campus publication journals and the ceiling. Because it had no identifying information on its spine, and was so slim as to be swallowed up by the official campus publications, it was missed. Finding it required near line-by-line analysis of the shelving. I will recreate this to the best of my ability, but please understand it will be difficult to do without photos, which I do not think I am legally permitted to take and post online.

Part 2: The Shelves

Imagine moving from left to right, like you are reading a book. There are 5 lines. Each line is a shelf jammed full of books. Line 1 is the top-most. Line 5 the bottom-most, on the floor in fact. Line 4 is Thesis and Capstone books, and will be ignored. Line 1 is pedagogical materials for teaching Composition, which are all 40 years outdated anyway. It will also be safely ignored. This means we will focus on Line 2 and Line 3, which are notably the ones also at eye level with most students.

Line 2 began with a section of poetry, which was extensively analyzed on a title-by-title basis. Looking at the full sum it is possible to suggest that this was a faculty collection dump, or at least a significant portion of it was. I confess I am still learning all the intricacies of small press culture, but I did notice a disproportionate amount from the University of Pittsburgh Press coming up.

Below that at the start of Line 3 is a semi-defunct experiment. An enterprising individual attempted to corner off a section of the shelving to be a student-driven Little Free Library. This move is something I deeply respect, but after a year and a half of observation in the room note that it is not very popular and receives little foot traffic. English students are happy to take books from it, but rare is the day someone deposits books into it.

Returning to Line 2, after the poetry comes the literary theory. This was initially glazed over, and I maintain I was correct and should not have spent as much time on this section as I should have. The real treasure was on display at the start of the line, hidden in plain sight. But once one reaches the midpoints of Line 2 and Line 3, something interesting begins to happen.

By this point I was several days into my observation and after my experiences with the suspected faculty dump I was beginning to know what to look for. Smaller books, thinner books, books thick but without text on their spines, anything that had been held together by staples.

These were rather easy to find once one recognized that you did not need to look through a stack of magazines to find the treasure in the middle; you only needed to find the lumps, gaps, or inconsistencies in the layering. For example, let’s go back to our earlier example in Item Number 2025.037, it was on top of a large stack of official campus publications. It took up 1/4th the size of the rest of the journals, the break in spine text and the dead air around it was a massive giveaway.

Another example is a journal titled (un)civil. It was found hidden between five copies of the journal Agni issue #38, and a stack of official campus publications on the other side. I do, tentatively, want to suggest that there is a correlation between student publications and other small press publications being lumped up with flagship publications. By association, someone is categorizing them as equals when one has large scale institutional support, and the other was made by 3 graduate students over 1 semester for a class project. Magazines go with magazines, and all are equal in that they were placed and forgotten.

This section of Lines 2 and 3 were especially rich in materials in a low-density manner. The suspected faculty dump was a vein of gold. These sections of Lines 2 and 3 were more like scattered nuggets of gold. This took about 20 minutes in total. To put that into context, I spent about 4 hours on the suspected faculty poetry. 

The farthest right part of the shelves was a no man’s land. Difficult to access during peak hours due to the placement of a table and chair right in front of it, the majority of this was more pedagogical, more mass market paperback books in poor condition.

Part 3: The Stratigraphic Deposit

Excavations continued at odd hours when the lounge was not in use, one of the many perks of doing this kind of research at the end of a semester. I returned to the lounge to do one final look as the fall 2025 semester was coming to an end, and this is when I found my curiosity drawn to the bottommost shelf.

Getting at it in order to see the entire shelf clearly as a whole required physically laying down on the floor to get a clear view of what was stored there (which I think justifies clearly why it was overlooked until now, given the hygiene of the environment.) The books were visible from the doorway because of the angle, but the closer you got the less visible they became as books were pushed up against the wall so as to become invisible.

What was found was a surprisingly robust collection of ephemera from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, with the bulk of the shelving being skewed towards the mid to late 1980s. Extreme caution was taken before I touched anything, as I immediately recognized the age of the materials and began to quickly run calculations on suspected rarity.

After this, I at once began to pull and categorize materials, but found quickly there was no real need to do so. Someone had already done it by publisher / organization. For example, all of Journal #1 was with Journal #1 in chronological order. All of Journal 2 was with Journal 2 next to journal one. Not alphabetized, but I managed to catch myself before I pulled and sorted too much out to miss the fact that this section on the floor had been placed with a deliberate methodology that I did not understand fully, mostly due to lack of access to the organizer. But I by now knew enough of this lounge shelving to notice this particular row was very different.

For example, why was a student publication from 1991 organized with a small press publication from 1984? The rest of it is too neatly organized to suggest a simple mistake. It could have had something to do with geography (journals go in chronological order with journals from the same region) but further study would have been needed to explicitly confirm this. All we can say with definitive certainty is that it was too suspiciously ordered to be a true ‘dump’ of random books in the traditional sense of what a book dump is.

At the time of writing only the first half had been gone through, and resulted in the discovery of 32 individual books worthy of archival preservation based on age, provenance, and explicit rarity as local small-press ephemera. Indeed, several journals from the early 1970s stated they were hand bound by the editors which implies low print runs that, coupled with roughly 55 years of circulation (between 1970-2026) imply low survival rates and low archival presence. Unfortunately, there was no way to reverse engineer my way to an answer here.

Conclusion

Having spent so much time pouring through these shelves, and collecting some 200 books (some of which did not exist in internet databases due to the fact they were hand-made by the authors pre-2000.) we should now turn to what it actually means to archive something.

Anyone can start an archive. But the difference between ‘archiving’ and ‘hoarding’ is often metadata. It’s not enough to have the book, you need to answer why you have the book, when you got the book, where you got the book, what the book really is, and how it was made, traveled, and purchased / found to the best of your ability. With metadata less is not more, as I understand it, more is more. Having amassed these books I set about building a Google Site, uploading photos, building a logic for organization (often just “year.Item Number”, which looks like “2025.001”.) and spreading the word among my peers.

The response was one of open curiosity to wild excitement. Students now could reach out to me directly after looking at the website, request a book, and have it handed off to them with the promise of returning it. A functional working system that cost maybe 48 hours over a week to build and $0. It is scalable, replicable, and easily done in any campus English department. As a resource, an archive is invaluable for both primary source research and inspiration. It also fosters a sense of campus culture, where students can literally hold pieces of their own programs’ history in their hands and know that, should they produce their own work, 10 years down the line someone else will be doing the same to it.