(Roughly) Daily

Sally O’Reilly on “gray literature,” why it fascinates her… and how an early “AI” attempt to harvest it misses the mark…

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).

Aspin was a community midwife in 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. Its Latinate lists, labeled diagrams, and die-cut holes of increasing diameters, 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.

Gray literature is a diffuse genre. Informational at base, its tone might tend toward bouncy sales patter or flinty authoritativeness. 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.

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…

Do read on for a fascinating/horrifying/illuminating tale all-too-relevant to our times– the story of the Webster’s Timeline History series…

On gray literature and Webster’s Timeline History books: “The First Tomato to Know Everything,” from @sosallyo.bsky.social in @cabinetmagazine.bsky.social.

* Marcus Aurelius

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As we hold onto the human, we might (in preparation for tomorrow) remind ourselves that it was on this date in 1914 that President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother’s Day. The previous day, May 8, Congress had designated the 2nd Sunday in May as Mother’s Day and had requested the proclamation.

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