Paper Trails #13: Burn After Reading (But Please Don’t)

Let’s be honest: most of history shouldn’t exist — at least not on paper.

Political manifestos that were supposed to be incinerated before the secret police arrived. Underground club flyers wet with beer and teenage sweat. Pamphlets urging workers to rise up and overthrow their bosses (all printed on the boss’s stolen paper stock).

These were the documents meant to disappear.

And yet, somehow, we keep finding them. Stuffed in shoeboxes. Wedged behind filing cabinets. Pressed between the pages of a cookbook no one has opened since the Truman administration.

Ephemera survives like the world’s most stubborn protest.

Take the anti-apartheid leaflets smuggled into South Africa in the 1980s: printed overseas, crumpled into the linings of suitcases, circulated hand-to-hand in back rooms. Or the ACT UP stickers that turned every public restroom into a battlefield for queer liberation, clinging to tile and stainless steel long after the nightly cleaning crew tried to scrub the rage away.

Every one of these scraps is a contradiction — disposable by design, indispensable by destiny.

Because that’s the wild thing about ephemera: the more power it has, the more people try to destroy it. The more they try to destroy it, the more obsessed collectors become with making sure it lives forever.

Somewhere right now, a teenager is ripping down a flyer for a basement punk show, folding it into their jacket pocket, and forgetting about it for twenty years… until a future archivist opens a box labeled “Random Stuff” and gasps like they’ve uncovered a lost Dead Sea Scroll.

This is how the revolution gets archived: not with leather-bound volumes and gold-tooled spines, but with paper that’s been spilled on, stepped on, rolled up, taped up, and torn down — and yet refuses to die.

So the next time someone hands you a flimsy little handbill or shoves a neon postcard under your windshield wiper, don’t laugh.

You might be holding history’s next grenade.