This past December, as my 28th birthday loomed, I did something slightly immature and dramatic: I posted contextless song lyrics on Twitter. The lines in question—“In 27 years/I've drunk 50,000 beers/And they just wash against me/Like the sea into a pier”—came from the Silver Jews’ “Trains Across the Sea,” off 1994’s Starlite Walker. Like many fans of Silver Jews leader David Berman, I’d found myself continuously returning to his work in the wake of his sudden death last August, not long after he re-emerged as Purple Mountains.

Berman fans have a way of spying each other across a crowded digital room—perhaps it has something to do with the precise humor and melancholy of his writing. A mutual follower responded to my tweet and eventually sent me a link to a Google doc. It appeared to be a bootleg collection of Berman’s poetry and short stories.

Titled The Colonial Manuscript (after the opening story), the document wasn’t exactly a literary treasure on the level of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, an unpublished novel found at his granddaughter’s home decades after his death. But it was a 53-page PDF of Berman’s writing, something that had become a finite resource in the world. His only book of poetry, 1999’s Actual Air, is currently out of print following a 2019 reissue, available only in ebook form or on the secondhand market with an exorbitant markup.

The Colonial Manuscript contains striking poems originally published in The Believer and The Baffler, as well as treasures like “Lady in Gunsmoke,” an imagistic short story that appeared in the now-shuttered Jane Magazine. These more fully formed works are paired with poems and fragments drawn from defunct or out-of-the-way blogs and forums. To see all this work together for the first time allows you to experience the breadth of Berman’s sporadic literary output in the decades following Actual Air.

I traced the ad-hoc collection back to its creator, Forest Juziuk, a Detroit-based music and cultural event promoter with experience in DIY publishing. Along with two friends, Juziuk assembled The Colonial Manuscript through years of unintentional archiving, sparked by a shared enthusiasm for all things David Berman. His writing wasn’t always easy to track down, and when the friends found it in literary magazines, semi-obscure liner notes, or even message boards that Berman would occasionally frequent, they knew it was worth sharing among themselves.

Juziuk was 14 years old when he heard Silver Jews’ “Advice to the Graduate” in rotation on Michigan college radio; he was hooked. Ten years later, he drove with some friends to Chicago to attend Aquacade, a 2004 show put on by Berman and his label Drag City at The Empty Bottle. The musician read original fiction and, in a surprise turn of events, played two Silver Jews songs with a backing band, in what Juziuk cited as one of the earliest Silver Jews performances. The show was quietly star-studded: Will Oldham sang backing vocals alongside Berman; Bill Callahan performed; director Harmony Korine and author Joe Wenderoth read stories.

It was after this night that the three friends started the email chain that would become The Colonial Manuscript. The thread continued on even as Juziuk and his friends grew distant over the years. When they got in contact again following Berman’s death, Juziuk realized he had enough material for a posthumous Berman collection and turned it into a shareable Google doc. He wasn’t worried about legal issues, since he’s not profiting from the collection and the pieces originated from a variety of sources. At this point, he can’t recall exactly where everything came from, and as such the pieces’ origins aren’t notated in the document. “The thing I like about having it in this form is that it’s divorced from whatever outlet it was in originally,” Juziuk writes in an email.