As this chapter was being drafted, I read “Root Cellar” by Theodore Roethke about a place, “dank as a ditch,” where the remains of stored vegetables served as the foundation for a rich complex of new developments, not all of which seemed very attractive; the olfactory sensations, the “congress of stinks,” did, however, represent on-going life. In reviewing the remarkable expansion of electronic texts available on the Internet, I concluded after a two- or three-week survey that roughly one tenth of 1 percent of the available texts on the Internet were reliable for scholarly work – 99.9 percent of the texts were who knows what. The word “cellar” means storehouse. And when it comes to root cellars, the word “dank” is not necessarily pejorative. But there is something antiseptic in popular images of electronic texts, archived, as they seem to be, in a luminous box or cellar above a keyboard: they are dry, they resist handling except through some remote medium, one does not press the flesh of electronic texts, and therefore one does not leave on them an ever accumulating deposit of body oils and odors as readers do on books in a library.