The Thing I Almost Left Behind

I almost didn’t buy it. That is the part of the story I remember best.

It was sitting among the usual things that accumulate wherever old paper is sold: postcards nobody mailed, photographs of unidentified people, church programs, receipts, maps, advertisements, and the occasional document someone has optimistically labeled “VERY OLD.”

I picked it up. I put it down. Then I picked it up again.

There was nothing particularly impressive about it. No famous signature. No beautiful binding. Nothing that announced itself as rare, valuable, or historically important. But there was something about it I couldn’t quite explain.

So I bought it. And that is where the trouble started. Rare book dealing is partly the business of being bothered by things. A name bothers me because I don’t recognize it. A place sounds familiar, but I can’t remember why. A date doesn’t quite fit. An organization existed, apparently, but searching for it produces almost nothing. Sometimes what bothers me is simpler: Why did somebody save this?

That question has led me down some very long rabbit holes.

Not long ago, I acquired a four-page brochure for the Black Dimensions Dance Theater’s Summer Youth Workshop in Oakland, California, in 1974. Four pages.

It would be very easy to pass over. It is not a lavish program from a famous Broadway production or a beautifully illustrated dance book. It was made for a practical purpose: to tell people about a summer program. It did its job, and then, presumably, most copies disappeared.

But this one didn’t.

Once I began researching it, those four pages became something else. They were evidence of a particular organization, in a particular city, at a particular moment, using dance as part of the cultural life of a community. When I searched OCLC while cataloging it, I could not locate another copy.

That does not automatically make a piece of paper important. “Rare” and “important” are not synonyms. But it does make me curious.

Then there is the Blue Dahlia. I acquired a small 1967 insert advertising a Chicago lounge called the Blue Dahlia. Again, it is the sort of thing that was never supposed to survive for nearly sixty years. It was nightlife ephemera, produced for the moment. But the moment matters.

Placed back into the world of 1967 Chicago, the piece opens a window onto the pre-Stonewall drag and queer entertainment circuit, a history that was often documented not through official records but through advertisements, programs, matchbooks, photographs, bar guides, handbills, and scraps like this one. That is one of the reasons I love ephemera. The object does not always tell you that it is important. Sometimes you have to notice it first.

And noticing is a surprisingly large part of this job. I have learned to pay attention to the slight hesitation before I put something back. Not because it always leads to a discovery. It doesn’t. Sometimes it leads to three hours of research, seventeen open browser tabs, and the conclusion that the thing I bought is exactly what it appeared to be.

But every so often, the insignificant piece of paper stops being insignificant. A four-page summer workshop brochure becomes evidence of Black cultural life in 1970s Oakland. A nightclub insert becomes a surviving fragment of queer Chicago before Stonewall.

Neither was created for an archive. Nobody printed them thinking about the researcher who might want to see them half a century later. They were meant to be read, used, carried around for a while, and discarded. Which is precisely why I find them so hard to put down. The spectacular things are easy. It is the ordinary piece of paper that makes me look twice.