A few weeks ago, we were up in Stockbridge presenting at the Creativity Seminar at Austen Riggs. In the audience was a rather nice person who happened to be a librarian from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. She was sufficiently taken with our work to deem it worth collecting, so on behalf of Yale, she purchased the entire back catalog.

Honored though we were to be deemed worthy of perpetual entombment in this lovely building…

…we were left with the somewhat daunting task of tracking down copies of our 33 books, albums, posters, broadsides, recombining cards sets, and other sundries.

But motivated by the lure of immortality (we figure that Yale’s not going away any time soon), we amassed the entire collection, which looked like this:

And now we get to think of our books resting comfortably in stacks that look like this:

Or possibly not. Possibly Yale reserves these lovely stacks for the works of Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope and has an unlovable closet for the unpolished utterance of small barn-based presses.

But we can dream.

Mostly, we are pleased to know that if the barn and all our hard drives are destroyed by an unexpected comet, there will be a complete collection of our work somewhere that we can visit some day.

Note: the lovely photographs of Beineke were taken by a fellow named Richard Cheek. Think of him with fondness and respect as you admire his work.

Note: If you happen to be the representative of a major American research university and find yourself freshly inspired to purchase the entire Idiots’Books back catalog, we might be able to work something out. But like the pretty girl who invites you to the dance even though you’re undersized, pimply, and bereft of self confidence, Yale will ever and always be first in our hearts.