sally test

In my modest collection of gray literature, the specialist title that comes closest to a blockbuster is Jean Aspin’s Vaginal Examination: A Unique Pocket Guide (ca. 1980s). Or perhaps it’s Dovea Genetics’s Beef Directory (2014).^[1]

Aspin was a community midwife in the Luton and Dunstable University Hospital’s maternity wing. Her pocket guide is a well-produced, ring-bound, wipe-clean, tongue-shaped booklet, published by the baby milk company Cow & Gate.^[2] Its Latinate lists, labeled diagrams, and die-cut holes of increasing diameter, representing vaginal dilation, step a midwife through the assessment of fetal skull position during labor. The Beef Directory promises “Rock Solid Beef Genetics.” It peddles not anonymous meat but the sperm of individual bulls with names that sound like variety acts: Tonroe Lord Ian! Utile Ben! Virginia Andy! Vagabond! Mornity Handyman! Pinocchio! Seaview Tommy! Atok Socrates! Kilowatt D’Ochain! Immense D’Yvoir! It is richly illustrated, suitably glossy, and a chilling ode to muscle. (Behold the bulging rumps of Belgian Blues!)

Among the most niche in my collection of niche titles is the UK Ministry of Defence’s Corrosion: R.A.F. and A.A.C. Aircraft (1966), a bone-dry primer on the control, rectification, and treatment of nine types of corrosion. The Kent County Constabulary’s booklet Special Constabulary Inter-Divisional Competition (1971) is possibly the least read of all. Copied from typewritten documents, with hand-drawn diagrams, and stapled between two pieces of medium-weight red card, the booklet was produced “to enable officials and spectators to follow the progress of the Competition and the fortunes of the teams” during a public event at a Kent police station.^[3] Fun-seekers watched on as teams, comprising police officers from different divisions within the county, underwent an inspection of uniforms and accoutrements, competed in a quiz, and responded to a hypothetical incident at a demonstration involving a vicar, an unconscious policeman, a drug-addled youth, and an old man with a loaded shotgun.^[4]

Gray literature is a diffuse genre. Informational at base, its tone might tend toward the bouncy rhetoric of sales or a flinty authoritative tone. Visually, it ranges between perfunctory pragmatics, rickety flamboyant amateurism, and the polish of corporate comms. The most reliable way to identify an item’s grayness is by its function and milieu. According to the 2010 Prague definition, established at the 12th Annual Conference on Grey Literature and Repositories,

Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.^[5]

Gray literature does not have the market or cultural value of a novel or textbook. It is not an end in itself, but facilitative paraphernalia of some other endeavor—midwifery, policing, animal husbandry, war. This vicariousness, and its heterogenous forms, makes it notoriously difficult to place in library catalogues. Should a practical primer on the mitigation of corrosion in airplanes be placed under Dewey Decimal class “671: Metalworking & primary metal products,” “387: Water, air & space transportation,” or “358: Air and other specialized forces”? When a bull sperm directory is a matter of genetics, food production, and commerce, which can it be said to be about? Gray literature isn’t made with libraries or bookshops in mind. It strides out into the world to do an honest day’s work. None of this hanging around on hushed shelves waiting to impart knowledge in the abstract. It’s got sperm to tout, babies to birth, aircraft to maintain, a policed public to mollify.

I find these publications compelling by their very existence and, for the most part, unreadable. Their content slides off my mind. Gray literature’s high and narrow window onto specialist processes is anathema to traditional general-interest non-fiction publishing, which delivers information like a tap dispenses safely managed water—filtered, chlorinated, and piped into your very own quarters. Gray literature is a sploshing bucket of someone else’s water, murky with unfamiliar vocabulary, its means of application not always entirely obvious. Each publication is an invitation to speculate on a sector’s operations, to marvel at the specificity of other people’s knowledge and the focus of their working lives. My paltry library gestures toward the infinite complicatedness of human activity and the vast, disorganized array of murky buckets out of which the materiality of our lives somehow continues to emerge.

I have recently acquired some items that confuse the already untidy category of grayness. While seeking out books on theatrical quick-change (more on that another time), I came across the Webster’s Timeline History series and, out of curiosity, bought the three cheapest of the second-hand editions available: Wallpaper, 1768–2007; Secrecy, 393 BC–2007; and Bristol, 1000–1893. They are collations of excerpts, references, and citations that feature their titular word or phrase, and there are thousands of them. The series’s aggregate subject matter reads like the archest of list poems, the word associations of a disheveled mind, or dying humanity’s life flashing before its eyes.

[SCROLLING/TICKERTAPE JAVA SCRIPT / VIDEO of titles]

Most titles are concrete or proper nouns, as one would expect to find in an encyclopedia, plus a smattering of the likes of Weaving, Burking, and Rimming, which might be gerunds, or present participles of verbs, or maybe participles derived from a verb and used as an adjective. A few books on adjectives—Elementary, Apertured, Wide, Basic, Biweekly—promise fun new levels of arbitrariness. Wide things and biweekly occurrences are categories worthy of Borges’s Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.^[6] The only adverb spotted so far is Whereupon, conjuring an indiscriminate cascade of consequences, from compensations to comeuppances.

That these books are produced commercially by a company dedicated to their publication could disqualify them from grayness. But to my mind, they qualify due to their narrowed view onto subject matter, their implication of expertise, and the promise of service that they seem to make. They look useful. And as objects, they give off gray literature vibes. Each book adheres strictly to a template designed by an engineer with a valise of presets. Its stocky dimensions, the title font’s drop shadow, the cover’s too many typefaces, the mean page margins and column guttering, the confusing page headers—no professional designer would countenance this. And then there is the cover’s overstretched and pastelated background image of a clock, wan with embarrassment at its static literalism. History is emptied of substance, reduced to the anemic passage of time.

The content of a Webster’s book is laid out in two columns per page, each column made up of between two and ten entries of swiftly digestible length, in a classic serif font at a comfortable size. None of the text is commissioned, collated, or edited by the publisher. It has been scraped and assembled by AI from public websites, open-source databases, and repositories readily accessible to all. Wikipedia extracts are flagged with “[WP]”; all other entries are unattributed. A bit of digging suggests that entries culled from sources with titles containing the Timeline’s theme word hail from archive.org, while extracts from novels (weirdly, presented as quotations by the authors) have been gleaned from Project Gutenberg, and online patent search engines are the source of entries on inventors and intellectual property owners (plus a full description of their patented gizmos—the collating AI is into patents big-time).

The relevance of an entry is hit or miss. The book purportedly about Bristol is glutted with entries for authors with books and pamphlets published in, but which have nothing to do with, that city. The book “on” John Smith begins as a stuttering, fragmentary biography of Virginia settler Captain John Smith, but the timeline is soon confused by the lives and writings of clergymen, painters, criminals, entomologists, historians, filmmakers, inventors, biologists, and others bearing the same name. Scattered throughout are total irrelevances in the guise of near-misses (“Graeme Smith, John Small”), and all this floats in a loose mulch of entries for authors with books printed, published, or sold by one John Smith or another.

While the lack of editorial direction renders the books themselves pretty much useless, the scope of the venture is remarkable. At the series’s inception in 2008, the publisher, Icon Group International, Inc., comprised Professor Philip M. Parker, sixty to seventy computers, and six or seven programmers.^[7] Parker had founded the company in 1998

as a “skunk works” to develop and leverage cognitive computing (a branch of artificial intelligence) as a means to digitally disrupt the publishing industry to address underserved audiences where traditional authoring and publishing approaches prove uneconomical.^[8]

A skunk works is an engineering or technical design team that often operates in isolation from a corporate parent company, or which otherwise secretly conducts its research and development. Parker and his team, on the other hand, were courting the largest readership possible. Not so much under the radar, as aiming to be radar—a universal implement for garnering and passing on intelligence. Icon Group’s earliest output was targeted business strategy tools—trade reports and global market projections for obscure products. One such report was prominently cited in Uber’s original pitch deck, but their products were primarily intended for companies in emerging economies or remote geographies.^[9] Parker’s aim seems to have been global, full-spectrum entrepreneurial saturation.

The Icon Group’s trade titles are collated using Bayesian econometrics, a method of modeling that infers outcomes from situations where existing data is scant, and which is often described as subjective, since it emulates how researchers can employ looser kinds of facts, making inferences from prior knowledge when hard integers are not available. Researchers have a commonsense understanding of their field and materials, have seen the usual scope of regular correlations, and accept the impossibility of certain outcomes. They will know the sort of places to look for existing data, and how to interpret it. The algorithm is fed whatever data is available from previous reports, as well as this more subjective knowledge expressed as numerical probability distributions. Computers then model multiple future projections, producing another dataset of probabilities and relations between variables, which provides the basis for the report. Perhaps these trade publications seem more directed and exacting than the Timeline series (which Parker considers his foray into culture) because any judgments on the substance and relevance of the latter are so subjective. The Timeline algorithm must navigate so much more unquantifiability.

Parker’s innovation was US patent 7,266,767—“a method, system and apparatus for automatically authoring, editing, distributing, marketing, controlling and publishing title materials.”^[10] He appears to have exercised its algorithms on a bog-standard PC running Windows XP, his computing power a fraction of that available to ChatGPT. Given that his automated forms are powered by what he calls an “‘artificial’ Bayesian Macroeconomist,” it is likely that the algorithms employ Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods and/or vector autoregression (VAR).^[11] Both came to prominence in the field of Bayesian statistics in the 1980s as processes of simplification that lighten computational load: MCMC by characterizing a given data distribution using random sampling; VAR by capturing changes in relationships between variables over time.^[12] Ahead of the curve, and consequently a little shaky, the Icon Group’s venture is remarkable for its prescience. And yet, a minor flurry of newspaper and journal articles published in 2008 focus mostly on the shortcomings of its output, their authors unable to resist making hay with the hyper-specific and quotidian titles and stirring up the pathos of the all-too-imaginable readership of (n)one.^[13]

[Another too-fast scroll/tickertape OR link to ‘Inventory’ column]

Each genre within the Icon Group’s catalogue calls for a different algorithm to draw on relevant sources with the appropriate methodology. The formatting of outputs is an independent process so that one “research” methodology can create several different products. After the trade reports came healthcare books—for people with rare diseases or without the skills or online access to seek out scattered information—which collate public, academic, government, and peer-reviewed research (thereby advisedly looking beyond Wikipedia) into conventionally organized and user-friendly chapters. Then, in 2003, Parker turned his attention to English-language learners, producing crossword puzzle books, classic literature annotated with translations of difficult words, an online word-of-the-day animation, and vocabulary-building video games that feature a tomato avatar called Webster, who blasts a path to competence through a low-res landscape of grass, giant pebbles, and loaves of bread the size of hangars, or through a pillared dungeon that is Doom-meets-failing-art-fair-meets-abandoned-language-lab. Around 2007, Parker began exploring how to make television programs in all formats—“news, game shows, documentaries, education, talk shows, variety, features, etc.”—in any desired language, to be presented by characters scripted and animated using “various types of content-generation programs.”^[14] At the time of development, there would have been several off-the-shelf 3D animation programs to select from. Even Blender, now a staple of future-tending contemporary art, had been available since 1994. And yet Parker’s proposal for lightning-speed automated television programming is not something I’ve come across elsewhere. But once again, the technical feat and scale of ambition exceed by far the aesthetic and conceptual qualities of the results. A video trailing Parker’s animated characters—professors, hosts, journalists, and experts—boasts a janky rainbow of men and women, a dinosaur, a jazzy cartoon cat, several sci-fi sex dolls (diverse within a narrow band of slim and busty), a baby, a robot, a panther, a leopard, a lioness, a lion cub, a tiger, a rabbit, domestic cats of all the colorings, a girl, a smattering of dog breeds, a dolphin, some more robots, a couple of emojis, a goldfish, some muscleheads on the edge of monsterism, some outright monsters, aliens, a lamb, a flayed man, a gorilla, more robots, a sexy female avatar, a boy, a sexy female android…

Parker’s vision was BIG. He was building up a virtual library of largely dormant textbooks, television programs, and games that collectively would circumvent many, many lifetimes of work hours. And he seems to have achieved his aims of vast informational reach, lightning production speeds, and the financial viability of “thin” audiences. Sixteen years ago, it took the Icon Group five minutes to make a video game, and thirteen minutes to research and collate a report on global latent demand for antipsychotic drugs.^[15] The company website claims to have published one million titles—though is “published” a bit tenuous when a book remains in potentia, unprinted, and unread?

The Icon Group’s backend database is a lurking behemoth feeding on the data sublime, metabolizing fractals of randomness until one of its cells is summoned forth. The informatic organism eats itself in Webster’s Timeline History: The Ancient World, 3000 BC–2007. Opening with the discovery of copper deposits in Cyprus, it closes eighty-four pages later with a bibliographic reference to the book’s own publication.^[16]

A romantic might argue that, by making use of the internet commons, Parker is exercising a freedom that must be maintained. He is a gleaner, with rights to “material kind-pay,” which have been enshrined (and subsequently dismantled) in many a society’s law since Leviticus 23:22: “And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger.”^[17]

A left accelerationist would say that Parker’s patent holds the very logic of capitalism at its core, since it is a technology “made from and for its processes of labour automation, commodity acceleration and financial speculation,” leading to “capital’s emancipation from the human.”^[18] A political adviser could spin the geometry of what Parker describes as “highly granular subjects (e.g., biodiversity, rare diseases, narrow product categories)” extruded through “global scaling (e.g., across languages and/or geographies)” in a couple of ways.^[19] Viewed benevolently, it is openhanded. In 2008, an Icon Group book cost approximately 23 cents to produce, keeping cover price down and throwing into sharp relief the monopoly-inflated prices of regular academic and healthcare publishers.^[20] Such a minority-interest provision might be likened to a little-used, remote, subsidized bus service, suggesting a communitarian access-for-all mindset.^[21] Through a less generous lens, it is entirely self-serving, the global scaling comparable to in-game microtransactions, where a multitude of thimblefuls builds to a torrent of income. An educator might say that, when researching, you get out what you put in, and that such a broadly applied methodology can only make for wayward results.

Parker categorizes his economic model as “long tail” because, after a few years of development and thirteen minutes of intense computational input, there follows decades of low-level, no-effort sales.^[22] In the background notes that accompany his patent, he cites an Economist editorial from a new millennium issue on communications: “‘Hard copy’ has continued essentially unchanged since Guttenberg. Letters are still written, books bound, newspapers—mostly—printed and distributed much as they ever were.”^[23] This, Parker goes on, proves a need for computer automation, which “eliminates or substantially reduces the costs associated with human labor, such as authors, editors, graphic artists, data analysts, translators, distributors, and marketing personnel,” and “allows title materials to be quickly authored, marketed, and/or distributed as the latest possible edition of the material and in the format and written language of the end-user’s choice.”^[24] Access is the ultimate commodity.

Parker describes his econometric reports as being compiled by a program that “mimics the thought process of someone who would be responsible for doing such a study.”^[25] When Icon Group was launching the Timeline History series, artificial neural networks were already employed in several fields. Developing the principles of early models of human brain sensory processing, neural networks apply algorithms that simulate the processes of real neurons to solve problems, and particularly classification problems—that is, identifying complex objects as distinct from their environment or as differentiated from similar complex objects.^[26] Judging from the papers presented at the 2008 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, this new generation of AI was already being used to detect, recognize, and classify Roman and Chinese characters, soft image edges, text in images and video frames, rotator cuff disease, spam, hand-drawn diagrams, cancer tissue clustering, radar signals, faces, gender, vehicle license plates, road signs, targeted aircraft, drowsy driving, speaker identity, emotions in speech, Metabolic Syndrome disease, marine engine and steam turbine faults, climatic variations in Spain, epileptic focus, human movement and posture, animal behavior, sonar, pedestrians, rotating machinery anomalies, the presence of jellyfish at New Zealand beaches, vehicle sound, multiple moving objects, jet engine gas path faults, bad debt risk, thyroid nodules, and stroke impairments. They were modelling or predicting genes, finance, traffic flow, Netflix movie ratings, atmospheric pollution, rainfall intensity, and the coordination of teammates during free kicks in soccer. They optimized intelligent water drops, silicon solar cells, hourly wind speed, and an opinion search system for consumer products, and facilitated obstacle-avoiding pursuit, mobile robot tracking, robot soccer, color image de-noising, barn owl localization, image compression, missing data estimation, multi-robot task allocation, melody retrieval, the pharmaceutical design of protein 90 inhibitors, ground-penetrating radar imaging, color matching, speech enhancement in noisy environments, and randomized path smoothing. They were solving stochastic games.

The mood of industrious optimism around AI has since been blighted by the 2023 Bletchley Declaration, which warns of AI’s potential catastrophic effects, and was expanded upon by a report published in advance of the 2024 AI safety conference in Seoul.^[27] We are already seeing the degradation of students’ academic skills, job losses and graduates with no entry-level prospects, error-riddled fake news sites with synthesized author bylines and profile pictures, publishers and authors suing for copyright infringement, the huge energy toll of server farms, AI that hallucinates non-existent patterns and “facts” in raw data, biased systems that reproduce racism, and algorithms, rewritten to compensate for this bias, generating racially diverse Nazis. The internet is filling up with slop.

While AI definitely has constructive, even life-saving applications, contrary to the hype of big tech CEOs, it is not the most powerful creative tool, more profoundly important than fire or electricity, capable of turbocharging scientific and cultural discovery and invention.^[28] Experts agree that AI is currently not capable of “performing useful robotic tasks such as household tasks,” “reliably avoiding false statements,” or “developing entirely novel complex ideas.”^[29] “Actually existing” or “narrow” AI—the currently available technology, trained on large language models—lacks fluency in inductive biases, which are the implicit interpretative faculties by which humans understand their environment in a unified, generalized way, using previously acquired, repurposed knowledge.^[30] AI currently has very little ability, if any, beyond its designated domain of functionality.^[31] It cannot generalize outward or transfer its learning between domains.^[32] And, most crucially, there is “the ‘problem’ problem.”^[33] At present, AI cannot set its own tasks to perform or problems to solve. It does not know what is important. And it certainly does not “produce” knowledge. At best, large language model AI, the dominant form by far, is a means of “rhetorical load sharing,” a collaborative process whereby a human submits multiple, iterative, consultative chains of requests, evaluating the usefulness and quality of AI outputs, and refining accordingly.^[34] At worst, AI is a “plagiarism machine” that statistically interpolates data—often badly.^[35]

Webster’s Timeline History’s all-too-literal compilation method demonstrates, through failure, the human author’s subtle art of subject matter delineation. As it would in a mind, the mental object “wallpaper,” “secrecy,” or “Bristol” cascades haphazardly across pages, and across times, places, and contexts, reappearing as physical matter, consumer product, historical artifact, digital analogy, literary device, and everyday metaphor. The difference is that though most entries are technically bang-on in that they contain the word that signifies the object in question, not many get to the nub of their topic. And, vitally, they are not placed in relation. These are the disjointed potshots of a disembodied “brain” that has not lived among people and made organic connections. I am reminded of my own callow misadventures as a pub kitchen apprentice in my twenties. Sent to the market to buy “something green for the cheese plate,” I came back with peas. AI is unworldly. It doesn’t understand.

Webster the tomato, the public face of US patent 7,266,767, is a latter-day zombified Thomas Young, chomping his unseeing way through the internet.^[36] Icon Group, managerial hand on the levers and an eye on the broadest aggregate market imaginable, brings some direction to his output—that direction being outward in all directions at once, to cover all ground, all needs, all tastes. According to Steven, who works in the Icon Group’s Las Vegas–based fulfilment and customer service center, the Timeline History books are among the company’s best sellers on the e-commerce platform that shall not be named. “We have covered nearly every topic,” he adds, implying the existence of a definitive index of all subject matter against which to check their back catalogue.^[37] Parker is a long-time collector of dictionaries; perhaps this is the level of topic coverage to which the Icon Group aspires.^[38] But in usage, the Timeline History series is a source of neither specialist knowledge nor generalist interest. In fact, it is not a reliable source of information at all. Without editorial oversight, the books risk replicating errors at minor and gross scales, as well as introducing their own. “What,” asks Professor Chris McManus, “if a software glitch results in 28 pages endlessly repeating the immortal words, ‘and yes I said yes I will Yes’?”^[39]

“Ever need a fact or quotation on soap?” asks the Icon Group website’s templated introduction to Soap: Webster’s Quotations, Facts and Phrases. Distinct from the Timeline series, this genre is aimed at “speechwriters, journalists, writers, researchers, students, professors, teachers, historians, academics, scrapbookers, trivia buffs and word lovers,” and claims each title as “the largest book ever created for this single word.”^[40] (Soap is 392 pages long.) The Webster’s Specialty Crossword Puzzles series, too, has a clear application—public transport is now a bustling venue for similar vocabulary-testing games, played on phones. What sets the Webster’s puzzles apart is their thematic organization: a whole book of clues in one language demanding solutions in another language, all on the theme of geology, Ethiopia, artillery, or whatever. It is no stretch of the imagination that the Icon Group’s healthcare books will be bought by desperate ill people, or that their trade reports will be snapped up by consulting firms, investment banks, and international trade companies venturing into markets for toilet brushes, wool grease, liquid eggs, scatter rugs, and so on. But the introductions to the Timeline History books forego speculation on their readership. Who on earth buys them? To do what with, precisely?

I was hoping to quiz private sellers on marketplace websites—people who had bought and exhausted a Webster’s Timeline History and were selling it on. But on one popular platform, though almost two hundred books are tagged as “used,” many are full price and so likely to be drop-shipped by “stores” with names like wowtrust and sales_sweet, which carry no inventory themselves but act as a shopfront backed by just-in-time supply chains that don’t always deliver the goods. Only a tiny handful of thumbnail JPEGs of covers have made the leap into badly lit snapshots of actual books on real people’s floors and tabletops. Most physical copies are sold by booksellers, their previous owners having disappeared into sales stats. I found two hard copies (two!) of Engines listed in a store selling mostly bras and motorbike helmets, but, following a stock streamlining effort, the business owner’s son had donated them to the charity shop where he works. Sweetly, the son checked, and, astonishingly, they had both vanished, presumably sold.

From the handful of extant online reviews, it is clear that the Timeline History books have seldom been appreciated even by completists seeking rare fragments. The writer of an Akira Kurosawa info blog derides Webster’s Timeline History: Kurosawa, 1910–2007 as “the closest to a publishing fraud that I have ever seen. There really can’t be any reason for anyone to get this book. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a similar waste of ink and paper in my life.”^[41] The book’s stated time frame, the writer notes, begins with Kurosawa’s birth, though the earliest entry in the book is from the thirteenth century. It has been framed, he suggests, to imply a particular focus that random mentions of a not uncommon surname cannot deliver.

Other online reviewers are equally disenchanted. On Kenrick: “OK THOUGH NOT WHAT I EXPECTED.”^[42] On Zopiclone: “what I need are the ZOPICLONE pills, I’m not interested in the booklet, the story booklet. Thank you.”^[43] And on Menorca:

Please be aware what you are buying here. I expected a summary of the history of Menorca, citing key timelines, but instead I received what could be described as a pamphlet listing chronologically, all the known publications about Menorca. For what I received, I consider it terrible value for money and feel very cheated. Maybe I misunderstood the content, but if you’re a lifelong Menorca enthusiast like me, please don’t feel that this publication will enhance your love of this fantastic island.^[44]

I think of subject matter as a comparatively bounded terrain and a theme as a looser, subjective gathering up or journeying through. These books are neither. They are haphazard sweepings of debris that has gathered in a random medley of indentations made by their nominal topic. The editor of Cabinet once described themes as “a tool for making the various disciplines and fields confess to their secret liaisons.”^[45] Picaresque thematic essays inevitably hold within them a portrait of their writers’ proclivities, expertise, imagination, preoccupations, and intention. In the hands of Francis Ponge, the subject matter “soap” lathers up into a foam of extended metaphors for ethical responsivity, moral hygiene, fragrant aestheticism, troubled waters, dissolution, disappearance…^[46] Anne Enright, contemplating “wallpaper,” finds correlations between patterns and stories, feels the “subversive madness” of repetition and notes the interdependency of taste, income bracket, and local mores in Bucharest, Dakar, London, and Dublin.^[47] Busy wallpaper; busy mind. The Webster’s Timeline History series, on the other hand, presses disciplines and fields rudely into proximity while doggedly feigning ignorance of one another’s existence. It might seem to prefigure the questionable open-handedness of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Printing Out the Internet (2013), but mostly, it offers a portrait of a canny business model.

I suppose some titles could be mistaken for commodity histories. Traditionally authored mass-market books on the human history of cod, coffee, sugar, or gold often reveal the barbaric, self-serving tendencies of “Western culture” and the interfering hand of the state in commerce and consumerism and vice versa. Potentially, they are political tools of consciousness raising. And yet these books are themselves commodities, and so, as Bruce Robbins points out:

The secret of which commodities get their histories written and which do

not lies in the everyday experience of the average book buyer. That experience privileges certain commodities over others: it’s hard to imagine a best-seller about kapoc or karaya gum—tropical imports used, respectively, in upholstery and colostomy bags—or about annatto seed, balsam, or camphor. The formula works only because, in the cases of cod, corn, coal, and coffee, objective economic dependence is supplemented by an instant and indisputable tug on the attention, and this depends in turn on a culturally specific mix: norms of intimacy and violation, empowered ambitions to refashion the self, susceptibility to guilt and renunciation, and so on.^[48]

I am pleased to be able to report that Kapok, Balsam, and Camphor are titles in the Webster’s Timeline History series, and that the rich subject of “balsam” also warrants its own volume of Webster’s Quotations, Facts and Phrases. Sadly, none of these titles are available as “used” copies. They have never been read.

For me, the most striking characteristic of the Webster’s Timeline History series is its copious indigestibility. These books miss the mark of human-authored reference works compiled through principles of focus and containment. But in their overfullness, they are clumsy cousins of what Italo Calvino categorizes as “encyclopedic novels,” which attempt to stuff into themselves the fullness and multiplicity of life.^[49] Calvino describes how Carlo Emilio Gadda “tried all his life to represent the world as a knot, a tangled skein of yarn … without in the least diminishing the inextricable complexity or, to put it better, the simultaneous presence of the most disparate elements that converge to determine every event.”^[50] And on the texture and structure of the writing itself: “As a neurotic, Gadda throws the whole of himself onto the page he is writing, with all his anxieties and obsessions, so that often the outline is lost while the details proliferate and fill up the whole picture.”^[51]

Webster-the-tomato might come closer to a maladroit, neurotic modernist than anything else, but despite these books’ chronological organization, they do not relate even the unruliest of narratives. And no wonder, if we adopt the neuroscientific definition of narrative as an embodied “biocultural hybrid,” which “evolves through the interaction of culture and the biological makeup of the brain.”^[52] These books have not passed through a human; they remain ignorant of culture and society. And yet they hold within them so many fruity fragments from which narrative can be extruded.

To those who admit that narrative, through its winnowing and winding of the mesh of real causal forces into a single relatable thread, is distortive, illusory, and responsible for much misery, a grab bag of sweepings might be exactly how they’d prefer things were left.^[53] But for those of us who, while acknowledging this distortion, deem it unavoidable, for we who continue to tickle form from the formless, these books are tantalizing.^[54] They seem to me like the first messy stages of writing, a footloose gathering of materials that might or might not make the final cut. They promise riches, their gappy fullness and arbitrary specificity a gift to a writer or maker struggling to pluck detail and contiguity from thin air. Is their best use not as a factual consultant, but a decision-outsourcing device? I can imagine them coming to the aid of a tour guide overwhelmed by the full spectrum of a place’s past, a pub-quiz compiler trawling the internet for an unusual specialist round, a muralist, novelist, or set designer in need of thematic detail to lend depth to a scene. If a cultural object is the accumulation of thousands of tiny decisions, then these books, these filtrations of infinity, these symphonies of automated caprice, can take some of those decisions off a maker’s hands. And so, I have moved Wallpaper, Secrecy, and Bristol from my “gray literature” archive box to the “writing tools” shelf not far from my elbow. And by this abrupt category shift, their potential readership multiplies incalculably.