New Hope for the Dead

This post is by Joe, with a postscript by the editor:

I Search Dead People.

Is that weird? Probably. But a series of trivial events ... a book order that led to the memory of a customer which collided with an image of a couple of dealers ... detailing the specifics would produce a graph that could easily be mistaken to be for a story on the search for the Higgs boson ... led me to google Allan today. Well, to be tediously accurate, I googled "allan" and "milkerit".

The web results were predictable. This blog, of course. A couple of other blogged RIPs. The seemingly active hundreds of listings of his business and "profile" (He’s been dead for four years, guys). Rather than traipse through pages upon pages of scraped muck, I tried something different today. I clicked the “books" link from the bar on the left. And with that one change, I went from disgust at the stunning amount of crap that the World Wide Web can generate to true appreciation for what it can provide.

About 54 results (0.19 seconds) ... of course, when you click to page 2, the total falls away to only 13. Still, a 1991 ad for The Gull in AB Bookman's Weekly ... his name along with other sellers, all trying to make a go of it. There he is in a 1990 AB Bookman's Yearbook as an “exhibiting dealer” with specialties in “19th- & 20th-century literature, Detective fiction, Poetry, Screenplays.” His "List 21: 169 Items" in the 1986 American book collector with his Pittsburg address (his doomed experiment with home ownership). A 1981-1982 Directory of specialized American bookdealers with an Oakland address.

Look! He’s an author. “List 38” by Allan R. Milkerit. Another titled “Books." A third: “List 40.” No details available. Snapshots of his life in books, presented in 13 links, some addresses, and a couple of book lists saved from the trash.

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Note from the editor: I differ with Joe a bit on this. Looking at this list in Google makes me more sad than anything, since so little is preserved.

This was once the lot of nearly all of us who were not statesmen or mass murderers. As you get older and prepare to join oblivion yourself, you notice how much fades. That brilliant young ingenue who was the talk of the town and seemed certain to dominate the theater (or literary scene or journalism) for decades to come? Gone somewhere, no forwarding address. In the moment, things seem eternal, but they hardly ever are.

The Internet changed all that, of course. Now much is recorded there. Young people automatically track themselves and other young people. But if you were active before, say, 1990, your deeds have been lost.

One of the first editors I worked under at the Washington Post in the early 1980s -- I was a mere copy editor -- was named Lee Lescaze. He was, I have always heard, a great war journalism in Vietnam. But he died young, in 1996. There is no trace of his journalism on the Web, so it is as if it didn't exist.

Soon, I imagine, this will change. Children will set up what are in essence memorials to their parents -- "if you want to know what Granny was like, click this." Which is of course in essence what we are doing here. The literature on modern bookselling is paltry indeed. This blog is a tiny attempt to add to that record.

Comments

[Joe Marchione]

We don’t really differ *that* much on this one... Thinking I had buried my post deep enough in the blog to go unnoticed [curses, foiled again], I overstated my appreciation for computer indexing (and understated my revulsion for the drek the comes with it) in what amounted to so much filler for a quick little intentionally bittersweet sketch of Allan’s pre-digital footprint.

Yes, we can look at those shards and sigh at how little was preserved. Absolutely! On the other hand, the fact that *something* was preserved is, literally, better than nothing.... And even with those paltry results, I spent a couple of hours seeing where those fragments could lead me on-line...checking out the addresses, maps, even street views. They don’t add much to my picture of Allan but they do add something.

What, too digital? Try this. The existence of “List 40” gives the attentive investigator a strong presumption of the existence (at least at one time) of 39 other lists. Shall s/he go searching for them? No, not just on line. Search for the actual list? When I composed the original bit, I edited out the line "I'd pay cash money for that" (referring to 'List 40') because, well, I'm broke (and I didn't want to give 'them' any ideas ;-). But knowing that 'List 40' existed (and perhaps still does), is, at least to me, better than never haven given Allan's Lists a first, let alone the proverbial second thought.

Meanwhile, the fiction reader in me smiles as a title passes by my inventory addled brain... “A Canticle for Milkerit.”