One shelf of the house was a stall. The record holds a flea market information page, a map file, and a set of numbered images in their own directory: frea_m_info, flea_m_map, and a run of flea_m_01 through flea_m_03. A personal homepage with a sale table was not rare in the early web, but it was a deliberate piece of housekeeping.

What the piece presented

The structure was practical: an information page stating what was being sold and how, a map showing where, and photographs of the items. Numbered image files suggest the table was stocked item by item, each photographed and filed. There was no cart and no payment page; the site offered the goods, and the transaction happened through mail, the way the whole house communicated.

What the record kept

The captures preserve the information page and the map image, and the directory listing of sale photographs. What sold and for how much is not in the record, only that the table existed, was mapped, and was kept long enough to earn its own folder.

What the table was for

A flea market page turned the site from a house into a small shop at the door. It trusted the same mechanism everything else used: a stranger reads, a stranger writes, two people arrange the rest. That trust was the standard plumbing of the era, as ordinary then as a checkout button is now.

The stall and the door

The flea market page makes sense only beside the mailto door: the stall showed the goods, the mail carried the negotiation. There was no checkout because there was no need for one; the whole transaction ran on the same trust as the guest book. A visitor who wanted an item wrote, and the sale happened between two people.

What the table sold is less interesting than what it proved: the house trusted its visitors enough to open a stall at the door.

The mapped table

The map file deserves its own note. A flea market page that included a map meant the stall existed in space, not just on the screen: readers could find the table, not just the list of goods. Whether the map pointed to a physical market stall or explained the page's own layout, it is the only piece in the room that assumed a visitor might arrive on foot.

The numbered photographs did the rest of the selling. Each item got a file, which meant each item was worth a photograph, which in 2002 meant a deliberate trip to the scanner or the early digital camera.

Commerce without a checkout

The flea market page is the record's small proof that a homepage could be a place of business without being a business. Goods photographed, terms stated, contact by mail, no intermediary taking a cut. The internet had marketplaces already; the point of the stall was that it belonged to the house.

What the keeper sold mattered less than that the keeper could sell it from the same address as the cats and the poems.

What survives of the stall is its paperwork: the information file, the map, the numbered photographs. The goods themselves are gone, sold or kept, and the record does not say which. But the paperwork is the interesting artifact anyway, because it shows the housekeeping: even a sale at the door got its own folder, its own map, its own rules.

What is not shown

Whether anything actually sold, to whom, or how the table was cleared. The record keeps the stall standing; the transactions left no files behind.