---
title: "Resurrecting the Nirvana Collage Book"
date: 2026-07-14
description: "A stranger's message about a dead link led to recovering all 52 scans of a found Nirvana collage book from the Wayback Machine, re-registering the lapsed domain, and giving the book a permanent home."
categories:
  - nostalgia
  - infrastructure
---


Two months ago a stranger sent me a message on Reddit. I found it last week, buried in a chat requests tab I did not know existed:

> Do you have a working link to that Kurt Cobain/Courtney Love/Nirvana book you posted about? I'm very curious about it but the link you posted no longer works. I really appreciate seeing effort being made to preserve media like this.

The book in question: on a rainy night in Seattle, in a pile of items marked "free" in my building's laundry room, I found a handmade book. Black cover, holographic dolphin and cherub stickers, duct tape spine. Inside were hundreds of magazine clippings of Nirvana, Courtney Love, and Kurt Cobain, glued together page after page by someone who clearly loved this band. I took it home, scanned all 52 pages, and published them in March 2023 at fishnofeelings.com, a domain named for the "Something in the Way" lyric.

Then I let the domain lapse.

The book survived three decades, a move to a laundry room, and a free pile. My website about preserving it survived two years. The stranger asking for a working link was pointing at exactly the kind of link rot I thought I was fighting.

## The Recovery

Everything still existed in the Wayback Machine. Not thumbnails, not a half-broken mirror: all 52 scans at full resolution, 166 MB, plus the original writeup. The CDX API tells you exactly what the archive holds for a domain:

```
curl "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=fishnofeelings.com*&output=json&collapse=urlkey"
```

That returned 116 captured URLs, including `nirvanabook-01.jpg` through `nirvanabook-52.jpg`. Every page of the book. Add `id_` after the timestamp in a snapshot URL and the archive hands back the original bytes, no Wayback toolbar injected:

```
http://web.archive.org/web/20241229024123id_/https://fishnofeelings.com/nirvanabook-01.jpg
```

Fifty-two downloads later, with a two-second sleep between requests to be polite, the book was back. Zero pages lost.

## The Server That Outlived the Site

Setting up redirects surfaced something I did not expect: the site's original CloudFront distribution was still running in an old AWS account. Enabled, certificate expired, faithfully configured to serve a website that no longer had a domain pointing at it. Nobody told the server the site died.

So I re-registered fishnofeelings.com ($16 a year), gave the old distribution a fresh certificate and a redirect function, and now every old URL returns a 301 to the book's new permanent home. Deep links to individual scans land on the exact page file. The link the stranger clicked works again, exactly as originally posted.

The scans live at [/archive/fishnofeelings/](/archive/fishnofeelings/) now, on the same domain as my other recovered artifacts. They are also in a git repository, and still in the Wayback Machine that saved them the first time. Three copies, none of them dependent on me remembering to renew a domain.

## Link Rot Comes for Everyone

The uncomfortable part of this story is that I was the rot. I preserved someone else's artifact with real care, then lost my own infrastructure around it through plain neglect. URLs are promises, domains lapse silently, and the person who made that book never got a say in any of it.

The Internet Archive is the only reason this had a happy ending. I owe them a donation. If you have ever let a domain lapse, you probably do too.

I also replied to the stranger, two months late. The link works now.