The volunteers who showed up were given a host of different jobs: assembling boxes, stacking them when they were full, repacking boxes to maximize the efficient use of space, and combing through the stacks and pull out unique examples of manuals—a task that was a bit harder than anybody expected.

First, you can’t tell whether two manuals are the same from looking at their spine, Scott says. They both might say 1080B on the spine, but one could be revision C, while the other is revision B. So each manual has to be inspected thoroughly. And while there was some general order to the manuals, in the eight years that Manuals Plus existed, their stacks had blossomed with quirks. When they ran out of space on one shelf for something, books would go wherever there was extra space. Duplicates were scattered across the room. These idiosyncrasies compounded the challenge of figuring out which books were unique and which were duplicates.

Jason Scott / Flickr

Eventually, it became clear that the 250 boxes they had ordered wouldn’t be enough, so they ordered 1,000 more. Then, on Tuesday, Scott realized even that wasn’t enough, so volunteers went out to Costco and Staples to buy more. In the end, with the help of about 70 volunteers, they packed up 1,600 boxes worth of manuals and shipped them to three storage units nearby. Even then, Scott says he’s sure they missed some manuals, and got too many of others. “We had three days. The right thing to do was spend two and a half months.”

Scott says that he wants to correct a common misconception about why he did this. He doesn’t care about engineering, or the machines that these manuals went to. “I never went to school for engineering. I have no idea what these are, I don’t know three-quarters of these companies. I didn’t save it because I was like, ‘Yay! My hoard will get bigger,’” he said. He saved the collection because it was going to disappear.

And now that he’s had a little time to go through and look at some of the manuals they saved, Scott says he’s finding a deep appreciation for these little booklets. “There’s value and meaning here,” he says. “Everything from the fonts and the layouts... How a company presents its brand, how it appraises things. And other times you pick one up and, wow, nobody writes with this brilliance and clarity about technical subjects. These manuals feel like they’re a project as important as the item they’re describing.”

* * *

So what does an archivist who doesn’t care about engineering do with over 50,000 engineering manuals?

The first step is to go through and figure out exactly what’s in the collection, then sort the manuals by vendor. After that, he and his colleagues will start figuring out who might want to take some of these old booklets. “Some of them will go to archives, there are certain archives that will want some things. Nobody wants all of them,” he says. At the same time, since Scott works for the Internet Archive, his natural inclination is to start scanning them. He’s already talked with Internet Archive scanning centers to figure out whether they could have some of the manuals uploaded online.

Jason Scott / Flickr

But Scott says he wants to be careful with his digitization efforts. Just like Manuals Plus struggled to make ends meet selling manuals, there are a host of other mom-and-pop manual stores out there. Scott worries that if he simply scans all these and plops them up online, he could actually put people out of business. “I don’t want to crush anybody,” he says. So he’ll start by scanning manuals that are easy to find, or that nobody needs anymore. “I’m very new in this area, this is not an area I was involved in in any real significant way until three weeks ago, and now I’m a major player, and I want to figure out what to do next with it that’s both responsible and helpful.”