Only through a long series of accidents do we have “The Works of Aristotle” at all—the Corpus Aristotelicum. When Aristotle died in 322 B.C., he is said to have left behind a body of 156 “published” works (“exoteric,” namely, available for public consumption). They survive only in fragments, too short and too few to give much sense of them. That his esoteric works, the Corpus Aristotelicum, have survived at all has been called “miraculous.” This paper traces how those esoteric works of Aristotle were transmitted over the next eighteen hundred years. My claim is that this transmission depended upon communities that kept these works of Aristotle “in print.” Further, those communities can often only be inferred, like the description of the substantial object from what is known only by its shadow. The paper concludes with reflections on the tenuous existence of historic texts and how the digital age may further threaten transmission of knowledge from the past to communities in the future. I propose that the transmission history of Aristotle’s texts may provide signposts that guide us both in handing down knowledge to future generations as well as in finding models for promoting knowledge and for establishing communities of diversity.