From the day that I first voiced aloud an extraordinarily vague notion—“What if I wrote a book about things that didn’t work out?”—my wife, Jennifer, has been there for me. She has been this book’s first advocate, its first reader and editor, and it simply could not have been written without her.
I am also deeply indebted to Dave Eggers for this book’s existence. After the first couple of chapters got dozens of rejections like “I’ve never heard of these people that you’re writing about”—as if that weren’t the point of the book—in desperation I sent a chapter to Dave with the note “Everybody hates this, maybe you will too.” And to Dave’s great credit, at a time when everyone else couldn’t even be bothered to go past the cover letter of an unknown writer, he read and understood exactly what I was doing. This book is in many ways a child of his McSweeney’s magazine, and he has helped it every step of the way.
Becky Kurson read my work in McSweeney’s and lavished praise and attention on it, becoming an extraordinary agent on my behalf. Tim Bent of St. Martin’s Press took a chance on an oddball book and then gave it more attention than I could have hoped for from anyone. On the home front, both my son Morgan and I thank Marc Thomas for being such a great Uncle Zonker to my Doonesbury. And, lest I forget, thanks to my friends and my parents; over the years they all have humored a fellow who, rather than seeking out a steady job and paying rent on time, lived on ramen and bought old books instead.
Finally, my thanks to the very patient librarians at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the British Library, the University of California, Dominican University, Golden Gate University, San Francisco State University, Johns Hopkins University, the San Francisco Public Library, the Concord Free Public Library, the Huntington Library, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the National Library of Medicine. Libraries exist to preserve the thoughts and deeds that no one else has time for anymore, to collect items that might not be used for another ten, fifty, one hundred years—if ever. It is this last uncertainty that makes libraries the most heroic of human creations.