The First Tomato to Know Everything

Sally O’Reilly knows from gray literature; her personal collection, sampled to glorious effect here, includes titles like Vaginal Examination: A Unique Pocket Guide and Beef Directory. (“Behold the bulging rumps of Belgian Blues!”) But when she encounters the Webster’s Timeline History books, she discovers a library of algorithmically curated, gray-ish lit that is at once audacious and useless. Her examination of the Timeline books is an entertaining tour of gray literature, a surprising investigation of AI in publishing, and a heartening embrace of narrative.

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.