A Bookshop on Memory Lane

Yesterday I was part of something very small, but very special—something that feels like what’s best about the internet. I follow someone online named Lisa Melton, who is well known in a certain niche of the online tech/Apple nerdery community. Lisa is trans, and she came out in 2023. But in 2018, she figured prominently in parts of the book Creative Selection, by Ken Kocienda, in which Kocienda parlays insider stories about the development of the Safari web browser and the iPhone into lessons about software engineering based on Apple’s processes and culture. Lisa was Kocienda’s manager and collaborator, both at Apple and at their previous company Eazel.

One of Lisa’s old blog posts, “Memories of Steve” was reposted by John Gruber yesterday, and in it she mentions Ken Kocienda several times. While I was walking home, it all of a sudden occurred to me that Creative Selection probably uses Lisa’s deadname and old pronouns, and for some reason, I decided this must not be permitted to continue.

As soon as I got home, I found my copy of Creative Selection, located “Melton” in the index, and began turning to all the pages where she was mentioned, redacting her deadname and pronouns with a black pen and writing the correct name and pronouns into the leading or the margins. It took about 50 minutes. (She’s mentioned a lot.) When I was done, I selected a page that had a high-ish number of mentions, snapped a picture of it with my phone, and posted it to Mastodon. Within a few minutes, Lisa had seen it and boosted it to all her followers, which are much more numerous than mine. She replied to the post to thank me, which felt very nice. I put Creative Selection back on the shelf.

Later in the day, the post got another reply. It so happened that the page I captured in my post mentions Lisa taking Ken Kocienda to a specific book store called Computer Literacy Bookshop, which, decades later, is now closed. Rachel Unkefer, one of the founders of the bookshop, is also on Mastodon and had seen my post. She was delighted to discover that Lisa had been a customer:

OMG this page image! Clicked on it out of curiosity and saw Computer Literacy Bookshop—I was one of the founders/owners of this store(s). So happy to know you were a customer. We appreciated our customers so much

I can’t tell you how warm this made me feel inside. It’s so small, but so human. By doing something spontaneous that I thought maybe only a tiny handful of people might even notice, I created a short chain reaction that (I hope) brought a moment of joy into a stranger’s life. I can’t stop thinking about how unlikely it was that Rachel Unkefer would ever have known Lisa Melton frequented her bookshop, if not for this “accident”. The internet (and the universe) is a funny old place.