The obscurePDFs Subreddit

r/obscurePDFs was created on 18 February 2019 “for sharing obscure PDFs that are uncommonly good reads.” Kyle asked on 2026-10-27 for the subreddit to be scrubbed for additions to the Library of Alexandria.

Routing record. This page records where every document shared on the subreddit went.

How it was read. Reddit blocks both browsers in this setup and refuses scripted requests, so the full history came from the Arctic Shift public Reddit archive instead: 868 posts and 3,283 comments, February 2019 to October 2026. Most of it is not documents. 183 posts are requests (“looking for a PDF of…”), and from mid-2026 the subreddit was overrun by sports-streaming and IPTV spam, about 500 posts. About 110 posts actually share a document, almost all from 2019–2022. Comments added little beyond replacement links for dead ones.

Every download was checked for %PDF magic bytes and identified from its own first page, rendered as an image where there was no text layer. Each one was compared with the library by URL, by SHA-256 against every archived file, and by title. Dead hosts were recovered from existing Wayback Machine snapshots, with the archived copy given as the card’s link.

Outcome	Count
New library cards, public (publish: true, linking the source)	54 (six after Kyle’s review)
Repeats of documents already in the library (count and where_seen updated)	10 cards, 12 posts
Books in print → anti-library (shared PDF not archived)	5
Already on a queue page (sighting added)	2 — Deschooling Society, Sam Hinkie’s Resignation Letter
Link-only (a web page, not a PDF)	27
Blocked, dead or deliberately not fetched	9
Not documents (adverts, tools, a pirated scan)	4

Repeats. Ten documents were already here. The Pepsi brand deck is now at 8 recommendations, the most of anything in the library. Simple Sabotage Field Manual (5) and the Valve handbook (4, posted twice to the subreddit) follow. What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial? came in as a request answered in its own thread and matched an archived file byte for byte.

New library cards

Card	Posted	Pages
The Eleven Laws of Showrunning	Feb 2019	25
Strategy for Camp David — Brzezinski Memo to President Carter (1978)	Feb 2019	5
The Role of Forgetting in Learning	Feb 2019	7
16 Habits You Should Do Every Day	Feb 2019	74
Reducing Entry Barriers in the Development and Application of AI	Mar 2019	9
JWT Planning Guide (1974)	Mar 2019	37
What Is Mindfulness	Mar 2019	76
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002)	Mar 2019	35
Technology and Ideology- The Case of the Telegraph	Mar 2019	21
ShipIt Journal	Mar 2019	26
Monasteries of the Future	Mar 2019	82
On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science (EWD1036)	Mar 2019	30
Schematic Storyboarding for Video Visualization and Editing	Mar 2019	10
Three Doors to Other Worlds	Mar 2019	6
Emblems of Exploration — Logos of the NACA and NASA	Mar 2019	164
An Interview with Michael Rabin (ACM Turing Award Oral History)	Mar 2019	35
Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change	Mar 2019	5
More Is Different	Apr 2019	4
Towards Virtual Reality Infinite Walking- Dynamic Saccadic Redirection	May 2019	13
Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia (JASON Study S-266)	Jun 2019	60
Google Fiber City Checklist (February 2014)	Dec 2019	29
Destruction and Creation	Jan 2020	8
Digital Decay	Feb 2020	13
Emotions, Muscles and the Cortex- A Physiological Basis for Repression	Feb 2020	32
Why Restaurants Fail	Feb 2020	19
A Novel Shell-less Culture System for Chick Embryos Using a Plastic Film as Culture Vessels	Feb 2020	6
Stretching and Flexibility- Everything You Never Wanted to Know	Feb 2020	68
Interregional Highways (1944)	Mar 2020	108
How to Instill Mental Toughness of a Special Forces Soldier	Apr 2020	14
A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages	Apr 2020	12
Production of an Original Surface Plate (Engineering Reminiscences, Chapter XXI)	Apr 2020	6
Money Creation in the Modern Economy	Apr 2020	14
Self-Organizing Systems in Planetary Physics- Harmonic Resonances of Planet and Moon Orbits	May 2020	17
Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email A Study of Email Refinding	May 2020	10
Behavioral Patterns in Smartphone Usage Predict Big Five Personality Traits	May 2020	24
The Rio Scale Applied to Fictional SETI Detections	Jan 2021	10
The Physics of Baking Good Pizza	Feb 2021	10
A Guide to the Layout of a Talmud Page	Apr 2021	2
Liquid Oxygen Augmented Gas Core Nuclear Thermal Rocket	May 2021	6
Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior	Jun 2021	10
Psychopathy and the Cinema- Fact or Fiction	Dec 2021	8
Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans	Feb 2022	108
How to Skate a 10k (and Also Half a 10k)	Mar 2022	62
The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp	Sep 2022	11
A New Interpretation of Information Rate	Oct 2022	10
The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism	Oct 2022	20
Crazy Sequential Representation- Numbers from 0 to 11111 in Terms of Increasing and Decreasing Orders of 1 to 9	Oct 2024	161
Visual Communication Design Terminology	Nov 2024	15

Published at Kyle’s direction (2026-10-27)

These six were first held back under the library’s rule that it holds documents Kyle archived, not ones he endorses. Kyle reviewed them and chose to publish all six.

Card	What gave pause
PSY Group — Marketing Brochure	an influence-ops firm’s marketing; the post’s political framing is the poster’s
Lemurian Time War	occult theory-fiction
The Physics of Space War- How Orbital Dynamics Constrain Space-to-Space Engagements	a pre-release distribution notice on the cover — Aerospace’s own published file carries it too; the card now links and archives that file
Fuck Off, Google	insurrectionary political tract
Pop Magic!	occult text, excerpted from an in-print book
How to Succeed in MrBeast Production	leaked internal company document

Books sent to the anti-library

Shared as full PDFs of books still in print, so the files were not kept.

• The Lives of a Cell — Lewis Thomas (Feb 2019)
• The Latin Sexual Vocabulary — J. N. Adams (Mar 2019)
• In the Blink of an Eye — Walter Murch (May 2019)
• The Mass Psychology of Fascism — Wilhelm Reich (Dec 2019)
• Tom Brown’s Science and Art of Tracking — Tom Brown Jr. (Feb 2024)

Repeats

• The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity — Mar 2019
• The Art of Revolution — Mar 2019
• Simple Sabotage Field Manual — Mar 2019, Oct 2024
• What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language? — Mar 2019
• Valve — Handbook for New Employees — Dec 2019, Jun 2023
• Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List — Jan 2020
• Pepsi — “Breathtaking” Brand Identity — Apr 2020
• PDF 32000-1-2008 — The PDF Specification — Jul 2020
• Facebook’s Little Red Book — Dec 2024
• What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial? — Jun 2021

Link-only

Web pages rather than documents. Recorded so nothing is lost; none were archived.

• Augmenting Long-term Memory - Michael Nielsen — Michael Nielsen’s essay; already cited on Why Books Don’t Work. Link · Feb 2019
• Quantum computing for the very curious — Matuschak & Nielsen’s mnemonic-medium essay; already cited on Why Books Don’t Work. Link · Mar 2019
• How the quantum search algorithm works — the companion quantum.country essay on Grover’s algorithm. Link · Apr 2019
• 1964 – Notes on “Camp” by Susan Sontag — Sontag’s 1964 essay, as a Georgetown HTML page. Link · Mar 2019
• Info Tech of Ancient Athenian Democracy — alamut.com Dead Media page on the Athenian agora’s voting and allotment machines. Link · Mar 2019
• The Singularity, by Vernon Vinge — Vinge’s 1993 singularity essay (HTML). Link · Mar 2019
• 1995 – The Evolution of Despair, by Robert Wright — Robert Wright’s 1995 Time essay on evolutionary psychology and depression. Link · Mar 2019
• David Parlett - “Rules OK” — David Parlett on game rules (HTML). Link · Mar 2019
• The Future of Cities — alamut.com page on the future of cities. Link · Mar 2019
• How I’m able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim — Gilles Castel’s blog post on LaTeX + Vim lecture notes. Link · Mar 2019
• The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race — Jared Diamond’s 1987 Discover essay on agriculture (HTML). Link · Apr 2019
• A philosopher’s 10,000 word essay on Erotic Art — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry. Link · Dec 2019
• Buffett’s Letter To Shareholders — Berkshire Hathaway’s letters index page. Link · Mar 2020
• The Cephalopoda / - Biodiversity Heritage Library — Biodiversity Heritage Library page viewer. Link · Mar 2020
• Paul Rand’s Logo Presentations (IBM, Amex. Ford, NEXT) — Paul Rand’s logo presentation books for IBM, Westinghouse, NeXT and others (image site). Link · Mar 2020
• Deschooling Society (1970) by Ivan Illich — HTML copy; the book is already on the anti-library as Deschooling Society. Link · Jul 2020
• How to overthrow a government — an anonymous essay on rense.com, a conspiracy-news site. Link · Oct 2020
• How to climb a coconut tree — a Belize tourism page with photos. Link · Oct 2020
• The Destructive Age of Urban Warfare; or, How to Kill a City and How to Protect It - Modern War Institute — Modern War Institute (West Point) article on urban warfare. Link · Nov 2020
• In the Philippines, the CIA Has Found a Second Home — 1989 Los Angeles Times op-ed. Link · Feb 2021
• East Timor: A People Shattered By Lies and Silence — Simon Fraser University page on East Timor. Link · Feb 2021
• Digital Real Estate and the Digital Housing Crisis — Game Developer article; looks like the one already saved as Land speculators will kill your game’s growth. Link · Jan 2022
• How to draw animals (from 1930) — French blog of scanned 1930s drawing plates. Link · Jun 2022
• 20 mental models that will make you more successful in life — blog listicle. Link · Dec 2022
• The History of the PDF — Sensible’s history of the PDF format (a web page about PDFs, not one). Link · Nov 2023
• De-urbanising the web: all hail PDF — Lab6’s manifesto for publishing a website as PDFs. Link · Oct 2024
• A collection of Valentin Glushko’s documents on the research of Soviet gas-core nuclear thermal rocket engines — Russian-language HTML archive of Valentin Glushko’s gas-core nuclear rocket papers. Link · Sep 2020

Blocked, dead or not fetched

• The Balloon Effect: The Failure of Supply Side Strategies in the War on Drugs | Charles A Laffiteau — Academia.edu, login-walled. Link · Oct 2020
• Videogame Cultures and the Future of Interactive Entertainment | Daniel Riha — Academia.edu, login-walled. Link · Oct 2020
• Design and Development of Universal Pillion Foot Board for Underbone Motorcycles — ResearchGate, bot-blocked. Link · Feb 2021
• The Professionalization of Cryptology in Sixteenth Century Venice - Research Gate — ResearchGate, bot-blocked. Link · Mar 2024
• Method for Turbocharging Single Cylinder Four Stroke Engine — MIT DSpace thesis; the download endpoint returned an empty file to a script — retrievable by hand. Link · Feb 2021
• Managing Modern Complexity (1970) — posted as a Sci-Hub link, not followed; Futures 1970, paywalled at Elsevier. [Link](https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1016/s0016-3287(70) · Oct 2022
• Anatomy of a 9$ burglary by Robert A. Caro — Google Drive .txt file of Robert Caro’s article, not a PDF; Caro’s work is in copyright. Link · Mar 2021
• Principal/Agent central planning model — Google Drive file deleted — [STALE] checked 2026-10-27. Link · Apr 2020
• Fantastic PDF that trains you to become a ninja. Everything from stealth walking to advanced weapon combat techniques in a very straight forward and easy to follow guide. — pdfcoffee.com, a piracy mirror; the ninja-training guide was not downloaded. Link · Mar 2025

Not documents

• Got some great sites for any type of PDF — a blog listicle of free-PDF sites · May 2024
• Principles of Radiographic Imaging : An Art and a Science 6th — a textbook storefront · May 2024
• Nova Ferramenta Gerador de PDF/ Documentos 100% grátis — a PDF-generator tool advert · Jan 2026
• I scanned my copy of Resident Evil Archives II in English. — a Patreon post of a fan scan of an in-print Capcom art book · Jul 2026

Open work

• A user-built “micro-archive” of the subreddit (a curated database called Cyberbunker, posted February 2025, index at linktr.ee/Cyberbunker) was not crawled. It may hold PDFs whose Reddit posts were deleted.
• The two ResearchGate and two Academia.edu papers, and the MIT turbocharging thesis, can be fetched by hand in a logged-in browser.
• The link-only essays (Vinge, Diamond, Wright, Sontag, the quantum.country pair) could become articles-to-read cards if wanted.