On Old Shit
Lately, I have taken to purchasing old magazines, issues of Scribners from the the late 1800s and early 1900s, some of which contain the first short stories of celebrated writers like Ernest Hemingway, and other treats which, to an untrained eye such as mine, remain undiscovered. I am not a literary historian, at least not in the sense that I could know what is in one of these magazines, but I can assure you, dear reader, that there is something of note in each.
Elsewhere, I have purchased issues of Jet; those are particularly interesting because they are more modern, from the eighties, and yet they too contain interesting factoids and illuminating information. You read one of these things, or even just look at them briefly, and what you see is a time capsule, something that contains an entire worldview summed up in just a few hundred pages. You don’t get much of that these days, there is no uniformity of thought, no point of view that exists from one person to the next. There are just ecosystems, small ones at that, and if you are tapped in then you are tapped in, and if you are not then you are not.
The thing about these magazines, or at least the thing that gets me about them, is how little value they actually have. Something published over 150 years ago, I can purchase on eBay for five or six bucks. It is, in the eyes of most people, pretty much trash; there is no value to it, nothing of any real consequence between its pages. And yet the Hemingway stories, for example — you’d have to imagine that, some day soon, people will move on from collecting the books and decide that magazines are the thing, that getting their hands on anything that he has published, whether it is in a book or a magazine, would have value.
Am I the only one looking for this stuff, very possibly; it is a small, niche world, that much I am sure of. Unlike art, which thrives on the secondary market, the resale market for literary things is not of any real value. Which maybe isn’t exactly true. At the Antiquarian Book Fair, you see books selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some of it is quite beautiful, holding extreme literary value — texts from time periods and places which are beyond the realm of imagination — and yet also some of it is very risqué stuff: Nazi and Confederate literature, the kind which has no place in our current moral environment, and yet still retains, perhaps for that very reason, some enticing allure (at least to collectors).
You see, as information moves into the cloud, it is at the mercy of arbitration. A filter, whether algorithmic or human, can choose to catch certain types of material, flag it for being inappropriate or out of step with the current environment. But as a physical item, books, magazines, tapes and CDs, these things cannot be destroyed, cannot be filtered, they cannot be held back from the eyes and the ears and the mind provided that one simply sit down and engage with it.
In art and ephemera you often find a history of a particular moment, a time capsule of senses and sensibilities, and by looking at history, you can know what it felt like to be alive then, or at least get a faint gist of it. But as history moves into the current moment, we find the raw edges of history being sawed off, toned down. We choose to preserve the history which we want for ourselves, not the one that actually happened.
