I have spent the last seven or nine months extensively and independently documenting student publishing and publications at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Such work has been aggressively documented here, because while a university may believe it understands student literary culture, graduation rates every 4-5 years ensure that learned expertise in the form of senior editors and publishers vanishes, leaving the landscape to look like a Paleogene valley. The dinosaurs of student publishing are gone, and new publications move in to fill the ecological niche. 

In those seven or nine months I have found, bought, or bartered for copies of student publications from the 1980s to 2026. Across that time span I have spent frankly absurd amounts of time looking at old bookshelves, overlooked bookshelves, bookshelves abandoned in hallways but mysteriously filling with books every few weeks, and on rare and special occasions, new bookshelves. 

Times change. And so do spaces. In June of 2026 the renovation of the UMass Boston English department’s graduate lounge was in full swing, representing a distinct aesthetic and philosophical change in design and layout. While I personally found the seating and chair combination distinctly uncomfortable (but, credit where credit is due, I did appreciate how they had wheels now!), we are not here to complain about chairs. We are here to re-acquaint ourselves with the bookshelves full of books now available to grad students in the English MA program. 

If you have not read my first essay, titled The Archeology Of A Bookshelf, it is my strong and fervent recommendation that you read this first in order to understand what I am about to do. Because this essay is predominantly comparative in nature. How did bookshelves in the 2025-2026 look post-June 2026 Renovation? 

The answer, in a word, is sleeker. Whereas before there was a chaotic mess of books. So many books had, in fact, been removed that if we treat each individual shelf like lines of a paragraph, line one was the fullest, followed by line two, followed by line three, with line four getting barren, and line five being 90% empty, and the floor level below it being empty. In fact, at the time of writing, I am convinced the shelves themselves have been adjusted, given the amount of space between the floor proper and the bottom of the shelf directly above it. 

The previous iteration of this essay states that “ Line 4 is Thesis and Capstone books, and will be ignored” however, these Thesis and Capstone books had been spread out and come to dominate half of Lines 1, 2, and 3 in a nearly perfect square. 

Beginning with Line 1, the left hand side was largely pedagogical books, and the right hand side was Thesis books. Separating them was a stack of box sets of lit mags from the 1980s-1990s under the title Story. Line 3 was the same. The left hand side was fiction, and the right hand side was Thesis books. In the middle was a fake plastic plant, and several loose copies of Story. Line 3 is where things began to get interesting. The left hand side was poetry, and the right hand side was literary magazines. 

I spent the most amount of time on this section because of what I discovered on the far left side. 

Most of the books were series, not stand alone publications. Whereas in January there was a predominance of random issues and Issue #1’s, most of the surviving literary magazines were at least in double, meaning there was maybe a Volume #1 and a Volume #2. Or a Volume #1 through a Volume #5. Interestingly, whereas before there had been six or eight copies of The Watermark Volume #23,  UMass Boston’s now defunct literary magazine which had been publishing since the early 1990s, there were now only 2. Where the other copies had gone, I cannot say, but this is undoubtedly a loss given that Volume #23 functioned as something of a rosetta stone tome. Even if one did not have Volume #1-#22, Volume #23 provided extensive documentation of them because of Volume #23’s status as a 50th Anniversary issue. Given that I have acquired most of the readily and freely available abandoned copies of The Watermark on campus but deliberately left excess copies of Volume #23 due to size and importance, the loss of 8/6 or 4/6 of the remaining copies was disheartening. 

Continuing with established practice, I began searching spines and gaps and lumps in the shelves for smaller books, thinner books, and unlabeled books. I did not have to look very hard to find what I expressly came here to write about, given the absence of nearly 80%-90% of the books on the shelving system as recently as May 2026. 

I found, first, a copy of CHORD Volume #4. 

I knew from the spine alone what I was looking at, because I had spent several months looking at a PDF copy of the cover art of it and wondering where all the hard copies had gone. The fact that one was found is nothing short of miraculous. And, if you’ll pardon my excitement, it felt like entering a pyramid you expected to be looted in the 1920s, only to find the looters had missed one corner of the basement level completely. 

It is the only known hard copy of Volume #4 (although PDF’s are readily available online) and is one of two known copies of the entire print run. 

Several other older titles of UMass Boston journals or MFA-associated journals were found, including Volume #1 (winter 2014) and Volume #3 (spring 2015) of a journal of poetry called No Infinite. Volume #3 is hand numbered as 20/150. 

College campus renovations are odd. You think you find everything and then a few months later something new appears in an old space, like the tide bringing in seashells.