Grocery List Book Author Bill Keaggy Interview

Bill Keaggy is a collector, maker, and breaker of things. He is the author of the soon-to-be release Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found. Recently, I spoke to Bill about grocery lists, his new book, and ephemera.

ephemera: How did you come up with the idea for Milk Eggs Vodka?

Keaggy: I started The Grocery List Collection back around 1997 after finding one ordinary list in the parking lot of a St. Louis grocery store. It was just a whim, though I have always enjoyed collecting and paper ephemera. I picked up one discarded list, then another, and that was that. They sat in an envelope until I put all 20-30 of them online in 1999--and it has been growing pretty fast since then.

In early 2006, the idea of a book version came up, and of course I jumped on that. It'll come out in May 2007, published by HOW Books...more than two hundred full-color pages with almost all of the lists are reproduced at 100 percent of actual size.

ephemera: That's coming out soon. Congratulations on the publication. What challenges or obstacles did you encounter while putting this book together? How did you overcome these challenges?

Keaggy: It was hard to look through two thousand mostly unremarkable slips of paper. I knew I had a lot of gems in the collection, but obviously, the bulk of them are dull. So, sorting them was an obstacle. I ended up breaking it into twenty chapters like with themes like poor spelling, extremely short lists, highly organized lists, sad lists, and artistic lists. Then, of course, I created challenges for myself. I decided I wanted a list from each of the 50 U.S. states, and I managed to accomplish that with the help of a few friends and a bunch of strangers. I also challenged my wife to come up with recipes based on various found lists. And I had to be funny. It's really a humor book based on this collection of paper. It's full of my assumptions about the lives I imagine the former owners of those pieces of paper living. Each chapter has an intro and there is commentary on every individual list: Snarky, funny, occasionally rude commentary. It's not a scientific or historical book by any stretch of the imagination. It's just a fun book--and it also includes a random food fact on every page!

ephemera: Sounds like great fun. I wish I'd have thought of it! What were your favorite discoveries, and how did they inspire you?

Keaggy: My favorites are the lists that tell stories. It's a lot of fun to imagine the stories behind these anonymous lists. You smile at the lists made by kids, cringe at the ones with horrible misspellings, and feel sad about the ones where there is some obvious health issue being taken care of, or a sense of loneliness. But it is inspiring because the lists are so honest and open. My main inspiration is to encourage people to see beauty, wonder, and humanity in little things. Although like I said, the end result is a meant to be funny and entertaining. 

ephemera: What surprised you the most about what you found?

Keaggy: I was surprised that these thousands of lists were so categorizable. Before I started working on the book, I had just been slapping them up on grocerylists.org, in no order. But when I started brainstorming chapter ideas, and actually studying the lists, it immediately became clear that I could sort them. I had always been highlighting specific lists in my list of Top Tens, but it turned out that that was endlessly expandable. It was tough to decide which lists had to be booted from the book. I guess that just means there are a lot of possibilities for a sequel!

ephemera: Who is your target audience for the book? What will it tell them about Americana?

Keaggy: I like to think that the audience is pretty broad--it ranges from regular people for whom grocery shopping and cooking is a fun activity, to the folks who find projects and collections like this interesting, to people who are just voyeuristic. The thing all of these people have in common is that they have a slightly skewed sense of humor. They're just a little weird--or maybe a lot weird--and they're proud of it. They see beauty in small, forgotten things. Used grocery lists are trash. They served their purpose and were tossed. But I save them--and a lot of people around the world save them for me. And they save them for you, and everyone, so we can have a tiny glimpse into the normal, funny, sad, unhealthy, forgetful lives of strangers. Although, the main thing the book and web site tells us is that a lot of people can't spell.

ephemera: The salvage of small, forgotten things is certain near and dear to the hearts of true ephemerists. Best of luck with the release of the book. It sounds like a fun read.