The Internet’s most valuable “lost” archive discovered

We’re making some improvements to the homestead which meant we finally had to bring order to the chaos of our attic.

I have two archives:

1) the semi-organized one where every course and sales letter I’ve written from the last 35+ years is filed in a reasonably ordered state.

2) the “casual” archive where I throw random stuff into a box and and when the box is full I haul it up to the attic.

I haven’t looked at anything in the “casual” archive in over 25 years.

For some reason, I got motivated to go through every scrap of paper in the casual archive. Some of this stuff I have carried around with me since I was 7 years old!

28 hours later (over a couple of weeks), I ended up with:

* 15 trash bags full of papers
* At least as many banker’s boxes (but I lost count)

…All headed to the landfill.

Plus one small box NOT headed to the landfill…

One roughly 16″ x 11″ x 5″ inch box (much less than half a banker’s box) filled with TREASURES like…

* personal letters to me from David Ogilvy and Eugene Schwartz
* my detailed specs for developing a sequential auto-responder from 1996 (Aweber, didn’t come into existence until 1997.)
* my self-published (made at the photocopy store) book: “Testing: The Key to Direct Marketing Profits” (1991)
* A printout of Dave Taylor’s list of all the companies that were selling (or trying to sell) products online in 1994. It came to less than 30 pages!
* The first issue of my print Net Ventures newsletter in which I interview a guy with a massive email newsletter and in which I state email was ultimately more important than the web (1995)

And on and on…

I didn’t realize I still had any of this stuff and it made me realize…

When people call me “The original Godfather of Internet marketing” not only are they right, I also have all the receipts.

For fun, I turned on a video camera and went through this box of historical gems, one by one, giving the story of each.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, here it is.

– Ken