Lexington, KY I should begin by stating that I do not have a mustache. Indeed, I do not have facial hair of any kind. That is not to say that I am not manly, but I feel that I should get this off my chest when talking about a Web site devoted solely to mustaches.
But I am getting ahead of myself. First of all, the important question is: Why mustaches? Well, for one thing, mustaches have cut a wide swath - or a neat, well-trimmed swath, depending on their wearers' preferences - through American history. Consider Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, or the Mario brothers. And besides the obvious connotations of manliness and virility, the mustache is inextricably linked to martial service. During World War I, all British officers were required by law to wear a mustache. The pacifist Amish so closely link mustaches to the military that, while their men wear beards, they purposefully keep the upper lip shaved clean.
The weblog Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century purports to be a serious examination of the American mustache at its zenith in the 1800s. The blog's anonymous author, who works at an institute dedicated to the study of facial hair, posts regular photographs he and his staff have uncovered. "My intent is not to shock or titillate, but merely to inform on the subject," the author states. "The nineteenth century gave us many things, but above all it was a hotbed of facial hair experimentation and this is but a poor sampling of those many lost forms."
Along with images of various types of mustaches, the author sometimes makes comments such as, "A fine and thick mustache that saw this gentleman's upper lip through many a harsh Missouri winter," or, "It is sad to see a man balding on the head and the mustache so young."
But this is all (obviously) poppycock, as the blog's true author, UK archivist Jason Flahardy, gleefully tells me when I visit him in his office in the King Library on the University of Kentucky's campus. "I'd always been a fan of the fake authority," he tells me, leaning back in the chair behind his desk and stroking his facial hair, which I have been asked to keep confidential for fear of Flahardy appearing partial. Flahardy's ideal "fake authority," the voice of the author of the blog, speaks with what sounds like good authority and appears to be telling the truth, but actually is just making it all up as he goes along.
Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century recently received an award from ArchivesNext, a blog that explores ways archival institutions can use the new technologies of the Internet to their benefit. It's attracted a respectable online following, and been linked to by many other popular blogs. Flahardy - and, by extension, the UK Special Collections & Archives - have hit upon that perfect combination of wit and seriousness to earn a glimmer of Internet fame.
When Flahardy began collecting images of mustaches, he wasn't planning on putting together a blog at all. In the spring of 2007, Flahardy's wife, who works in UK's Young Library, spoke with his boss about putting together a slideshow of archival images to show at the undergraduate reference desk. The goal was to celebrate Archives Week, an annual state-wide event in October sponsored by the Kentucky Council on Archives. Flahardy manages audio/visual archives for the King Library - basically, he tells me, he's in charge of anything that's not paper - and over the years he and his colleagues had joked about the piles and piles of images of anonymous men sporting all kinds mustaches: big ones, small thin ones, and everything in between. Naturally, using the mustache pictures for the slideshow was a no-brainer.
"We needed about 40 images," Flahardy says. "But when we went and gathered up all the images that we had already scanned, we found out we had more than 300. And it seemed a shame not to do anything with it." So Flahardy hit upon a bit of mustachioed genius. As a way to cross-promote Archives Week, he created a blog on Blogger.com in July 2007. He posted one mustache a day - "an amazing rate, at first" - following a strict schedule.
Flahardy intended to let the blog run its course until the Archives Week exhibit in Young Library ended, and then quietly close the blog and move on. But then the site started taking on a life of its own. "I couldn't just post the photos," he admits. "I couldn't really resist joking. So I kept writing it like it was this high Victorian piece, with this serious researcher who is really looking into the mustaches of the nineteenth century." One who is extremely biased against beards.
The site developed up a glossary of technical terms (all made up), a complicated and detailed system of mustache classification, and of course Flahardy's unique voice. Blog readership grew slowly, but surely. He began receiving comments for the blog ("insightful remarks by mustache lovers") and the site traded links with other sites such as the Handlebar Club and the Mustache Registry.
Then an instant shot of fame came on Oct. 3, 2007, when Flahardy's blog was mentioned on Boing Boing, the Internet's self-described "directory of wonderful things." Devoted to all that is strange, chic, funny or ironic online - at least, according to their own definitions of the terms - Boing Boing is the arbiter of taste for a large swath of the Internet's hipper denizens. (To give an idea of the other sorts of topics Boing Boing covers, that same day the site linked to an avant-garde architecture group's project to turn cell phone text messages into smoke signals, an account of a man chasing nine bats from his house, and a BBC story about London police mistaking the smoke from a Thai restaurant's kitchen for a biological weapon attack.) For a blog like Flahardy's, a link on Boing Boing is like an artist getting a mention in the New Yorker.
With the Boing Boing post, Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century saw an instant surge in hits and that moment of Warhol-esque instant Internet celebrity it needed to keep going. (Today, posting has slowed down, but the site still gets 300 or so visitors a day.) Then the blog received the ArchivesNext award for "Most Whimsical Archives-Related Website" of 2009. The editors of ArchivesNext noted that the site is "a masterful re-purposing of something almost every archives has a lot of - unidentified photographs."
The site succeeds so well because it does something with images that have no context, which ordinarily have little importance. "An anonymous photo with no contextual information has no historical value," Flahardy says. "And every archive that has photos has thousands of anonymous photos."
In his day-to-day work in the UK archives, Flahardy is responsible for finding photos of specific people or things for library patrons and for tagging and cataloguing new acquisitions, which seems to be a never-ending process. Flahardy scans photos, adds any descriptive information, and then houses and protects them. The archives just acquired the Herald-Leader's photo collection from 1945 to 1990, which amounts to around 1.8 million photographs. There's clearly a lot of work to do. Archivists don't try to decide what's important to history - their goal is to preserve everything that can be preserved, and let future historians make those decisions. Even if they involve mustaches.
So what's Flahardy's favorite kind of mustache? "I like the big and bushy. I like the Nietzsche, kind of crazy." Least favorite? "All those sketchy kinds of mustaches. Those little pencilly mustaches that never seem to go anywhere." If Barack Obama grew a mustache, what kind of mustache would he have? "He'd have a good bushy one. He has a long philtrum, that's what makes for a good mustache. And if he has good follicle density on top of that, that's where the good mustache comes from."
Near the end of my visit, I ask Flahardy why the mustache has fallen out of favor in modern society. He gets philosophical. He thinks it's the association with police and sleaze in the 1970s. "But they seem to be on kind of an upswing, you know. Having been radicalized to mustache consciousness, you do see it more and more." He leans forward at his desk. "I'm not going to say that I drove it, but you hear more about it. A lot of people contact me, and they're happy about mustache promotion."
So maybe I should think about putting my razor away and growing one.