“They own it — they are a library — they bought the book,” said Mark Graham, director of The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. “And they chose to make a digital copy available for lending.”

The library uploaded a copy of Mark Judge’s “Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk,” to the Internet Archive this week, making a free digital version available for people to check out.

You no longer have to shell out nearly $2,000 to get a look at the book by the friend of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — the one about teenage drinking and private school culture. And you have the Boston Public Library to thank.


The book, which was first published in hard copy in 1997 — and has proven hard to track down — was uploaded Tuesday.

The Boston Public Library lists the Internet Archive as one of its media partners on its website.

Lisa Pollack, spokeswoman for the library, said in a statement that the BPL is currently running a pilot program in partnership with the Internet Archive, “where an out of print book in our collection may be lent digitally, with a standard loan period, one item-loan at a time, as long as the physical copy is not also being lent at the same time.”

“Wasted” is an out-of-print memoir penned by Judge, who was named by Christine Blasey Ford when she came forward with allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her as a teenager in 1980s.

Ford said that she escaped Kavanaugh’s alleged attack when Judge, who she said was in the room at the time, “jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling,” according to reports.

Both Kavanaugh and Judge, who were friends at Georgetown Preparatory School, denied Ford’s allegations.


As Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s respective testimonies about the decades-old allegations became a media spectacle last week, following an emotional Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, people became interested in reading Judge’s book.

The memoir, which features a brief mention of a “Bart O’Kavanaugh,” is filled with tales of “alcoholism, binge drinking, and hookup culture at Georgetown Preparatory School,” according to a description on InternetArchive.org. It delves into Judge’s “early formative experiences growing up in suburbs of Washington, D.C. under Catholic school education.”

At first, one of the only ways to get the book locally was to purchase it on Amazon for $1,849. A second way — which a Globe reporter had success with — was to go to the Boston Public Library to read it.

Now, it’s more easily accessible.

Officials from the library did not answer a follow-up e-mail about why they decided to share the book now.

But Graham surmised that they’re “interested in providing access to important material” to the public.

While the book is now available in a digital format, people eager to tear through the BPL’s copy will have to be patient.

As of Thursday, there was a backlog of intrigued readers: The book is currently on loan, with 228 patrons lined up to be next.

Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @steveannear. Aimee Ortiz of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.