Civil Lines went to bed in 2001 and rose nearly a decade later in an unrecognizable world. Rip Van Winkle slept twice as long but woke up less disoriented: time moves faster in googleworld than it did in the Catskills in the late eighteenth century. The best explanation for the elephantine gestation of Civil Lines 6 is the truth, in the words of the editors themselves: unsure of their editorial judgement, they waited for the submissions to pass the test of time. And this is a collection of the pieces that survived.