There are peo­ple, includ­ing my wife and me, who think an enter­tain­ing vaca­tion must include a day or two of dri­ving out into a desert in a rented sedan, fol­low­ing a hand-​​drawn track on a sketchy mimeo­graphed map, bump­ing along washed-​​out log­ging roads and beside pre­cip­i­tous drops—to stare at the ground and pick crap up and take it home with us. Rocks, fossils,mainly. Most times we man­age to find the place, and park the car in the mid­dle of the exactly-​​car-​​sized dirt road, and set to. Stare at the ground, put some stuff in our pock­ets, and head back to the hotel before search par­ties are required.

Now, we are pure ama­teurs. Our enjoy­ment comes from no dri­ving need to dis­cover Impor­tant Things, nor from avarice, nor EXXXtreme Thrill-​​seeking[!]. What we are in fact seek­ing in our trav­els is the den­sity of the world. We search for the unre­marked, the fraught.

To walk, for exam­ple, in the noon­day sun along the edge of a ranch fence in the Mojave Desert, just 500 yards from both a high-​​traffic Inter­state and a dis­used rail­road track, and in twenty min­utes fill a box with snowflake obsid­ian: Who knew it was there? Arguably almost nobody.

To drive five miles along muddy ranch roads (yes, with per­mis­sion) on San­dra Day O’Connor’s child­hood stomp­ing grounds to reach a pub­lic pas­ture of a park where you can pick among the cow pies for fire agates: Who knew it was there? Almost nobody.

To park at a fish­ing stream in a state park in Ohio, and trudge a few hun­dred yards up towards the dam, and there face a rock wall where any easily-​​grabbed hand­ful of the soft clay seam will con­tain hun­dreds of per­fect casts of bra­chiopods, trilo­bites, bry­ozoa. And there to drop a per­fect bra­chio­pod, one of your prizes, and have it crack open on a rock and dis­cover that inside the cast of the shell are a mil­lion shin­ing cal­cite crys­tals? Who knew those Ordovi­cian fos­sils were also geo­des, lit­tle caches of antique light?

And more specif­i­cally, who knew about that par­tic­u­lar obsid­ian, that par­tic­u­lar fire agate, those par­tic­u­lar bra­chiopods? Nobody at all. They were in the ground ’til we found them. And also right there in plain sight. Unremarked.

Inter­est­ingly, we do not dis­play these won­ders. We tend to leave them in boxes, often in the same wrap­per we used to pick them up. As if the exotic Pig­gly Wig­gly bag is an anno­ta­tion of the time and place, nearly as impor­tant as the stuff itself.¹ You might think that’s weird.

What we col­lect is not spec­i­mens, but their impli­ca­tions, their con­no­ta­tions. We do not aim at com­plete­ness; there is no such thing. Indeed, the point is to cap­ture a frag­ment the illim­itable. The junk in our boxes is not there as a scrap­book of nos­tal­gic mem­o­ries; they’re pieces of little-​​known dense contexts.

They’re eso­ter­ica. The object itself is less impor­tant than its chain of meaning.

And so it is also with books—using the term very gen­er­ally. We have many, many books (though we’re try­ing to cut down a bit). We’ve spe­cial­ized. For the last five years or so, we’ve essen­tially stopped buy­ing new books entirely, except for pro­gram­ming books and the usual inter­est­ing stuff at book sales (that’s cut­ting, trust me).

Instead, now we are sur­rounded (alarm­ingly, in fact) with old books. Which, you will ask? The clas­sics? The canon? First Edi­tions? Pay atten­tion much? Scroll up, and re-​​read, and come back here when you get it.

What we have here are about 4000 books of (1) Pri­vately Printed kook­ery, (2) cheap pirated vol­umes trans­lated badly from the Euro­pean orig­i­nals, (3) bound mag­a­zines, and (4) lots of other things lost like that. Books that exist in fewer than 1000 copies. Books that have never been checked out of the libraries where they were housed. The ubiq­ui­tous, but rare: the unre­marked.

By weight and vol­ume, the thing we have most of is mag­a­zines. There were a lot of mag­a­zines pub­lished in the last 150 years. Not just your com­mon sta­ples like Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s, Munsey’s, Scribner’s and Graham’s, but also your more exotic Arena, Mother Earth, Mag­a­zine for Moth­ers, and Unpop­u­lar Review. We have a few exam­ples of many (like The Rad­i­cal), and many vol­umes of some (say, The Knicker­bocker).

Right next to my left foot is a shop­ping bag with four vol­umes I picked up at John King the other day. Three bound six-​​month vol­umes of the Eclec­tic Mag­a­zine, and one inter­est­ing bound vol­ume of Chapman’s Mag­a­zine. In the lat­ter are works by Robert W. Cham­bers, and Joel Chan­dler Har­ris, and folks like that.

And mixed in among the authors you rec­og­nize are twice as many pieces by those you won’t. Arti­cles and sto­ries and poems by peo­ple the edi­tors con­sid­ered to be worth­while con­trib­u­tors, some of the world’s best (estab­lished or new) thinkers, authors, the­olo­gians, politicians.

And when you read all that work, you must be struck by its sim­i­lar­ity to the Famous Authors inter­leaved. Edi­tors were not fools: they tended to pay for work of a cer­tain qual­ity and voice. Right next to Wash­ing­ton Irving’s amus­ing but lyri­cal travel piece, you will find some other author’s amus­ing but lyri­cal biog­ra­phy. Seri­al­ized nov­els in one mag­a­zine might include chap­ters of Dick­ens or Holmes, but in the same issues a novel of sim­i­lar qual­ity by a now-​​forgotten “lesser” author.

Who knew all this trea­sure was in there? Nobody, appar­ently. When it comes to some of the scarcer mag­a­zines, the only ref­er­ence to the vol­umes you will find will be a library card cat­a­log or a bookseller’s price list.

By way of Danny Yee, I have just been read­ing an Inside Higher Ed piece on Franco Moretti. And there’s the ongo­ing seminar/​event at the Valve. I am reminded of the Genre Evo­lu­tion project here at the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan.

But it’s all about the books. Not the magazines.

So this is me draw­ing a map to the aban­doned mines, for you his­to­ri­ans and lit­er­ary types: Go to the mag­a­zines. For every piece of clas­sic and impor­tant writ­ing you know from books—the stuff that’s been vet­ted and culled and revised and reprinted over many decades—there are five or ten or a hun­dred times more pieces that fell by the way­side. They never made it out of the orig­i­nal magazines.

So, 19^th-​​C lit­er­ary schol­ars: have you read The Quod Cor­re­spon­dence? Me, I have it right here.

I am still read­ing the Valve sem­i­nar myself, and have not yet got my copy of Moretti, but I still think this is the les­son you should glean from Moretti’s work, and related work like the Genre Evo­lu­tion project: The process of selec­tion is inher­ently ran­dom. Con­tem­po­rary read­ers read the whole mag­a­zine through, didn’t they? They read their Cham­bers, and their Machen, and their Irv­ing, and their Holmes, and their Dick­ens; and they read the other peo­ple, the ones you never heard of. These “lesser” (mean­ing “lesser-​​known”, not “worse”) authors were pre­sented in their first pub­li­ca­tions as peers of the greats you know.

How did they become “lesser”? You think it was because of qual­ity? Qual­ity when: then, or now? Whose stan­dards will you use?

Maybe it’s time to take a lit­tle trip along the lesser-​​traveled roads. It will be bumpy, and per­haps a bit thrilling. But I can tell you a place to find some won­der­ful things. Who knew they were there?

Well, we do here. And I sus­pect the authors them­selves did, too. Because they would have read one another’s work in the mag­a­zines.. Not in books. Though you do.

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¹ When I was 5 years old, my fam­ily trav­eled to Hawaii. A few years ago, in sort­ing out my father’s effects after he died, we came across a hand­ker­chief of his with some­thing in it. Green Hawai­ian sand, as it hap­pens. Clearly, the hand­ker­chief was as impor­tant as the sand.