Publications are difficult to keep up. Unlike a book—which you can write and publish once—a publication regularly is preparing to work on a new issue. Publications bear much resemblance to warm-blooded animals. They require constant attention, energy, and love. Every publication comes to an end at some point. I understand that.

A few mornings ago, I woke up thinking about Lucky Peach. While I wouldn’t call myself a foodie, I did admire the publication. Amongst the many things I want to say about it, the one I find difficult to contain—and accept—is that it’s effectively lost to the internet. A person decided to shut Lucky Peach down. A person made a decision not to renew LuckyPeach.com, and so it’s not there anymore. Worse yet—a much less scrupulous person bought LuckyPeach.com and turned it into a spam blog. Lucky Peach deserves better.

It’s shocking to me that an article like Fuchsia Dunlop’s James Beard award-winning “London’s Chinatown,” and Hannah K. Lee’s art, is all but completely lost to the vast majority of us who do not have a print edition of that specific issue of Lucky Peach. It’s hanging on by a thread, held together by The Wayback Machine. I savored reading it. I found another version at Lucky Peach’s Tumblr soon after.

I wrote down an idea after I woke up: what if there was a Lucky Peach Archive? The same way Fictive Kin maintains its Marc Andreessen Archive (which is quoted often!). I would not consider there to be any direct monetary value out of this project—because the intellectual property is Lucky Peach’s—but I am sure the proprietors, authors, and editors would not mind if the words of the publication were back online and easier to find. It would be a project for education, preservation, and love.

I think the world would be better if this type of manual archival and re-publishing happened more often. (There’s demand for a Shirky archive as well.)