Corvus Distribution

Corvus Distribution

Kevin Carson on Corvus, and an update

September 15, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Kevin Carson’s latest post talks about my micropublishing project, Corvus Editions, as an example of “household and informal microenterprise.” It includes some details about operating costs and such, taken from a mailing list exchange, which will be new to readers of this blog. I’ll be producing a report on the first three months of operations, in the first issue of M. Corbeau’s Blackbird, sometime around October 1. I expect to have about 100 titles in the catalog at that point, including a third issue of LeftLiberty, a collection of mutualist, proto-mutualist, and near-mutualist texts from the Owenite “high tide” of […]
Corvus Distribution

Corvine Call #4 – LeftLiberty #2

August 8, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
I spent our week of record heat digging around in various archives, when I would much rather have been concentrating on writing, as well as getting a few things ready for my weekend of tabling. And then I’ve spent the last week playing catch-up on the writing and attempting to process the lessons of the weekend. In the end, it’s made for a very productive few days, as all of that came together. Even after splitting the issue, LeftLiberty #2 will be at least twenty pages longer than the first issue, and it should also be far superior in almost […]
Corvus Distribution

Benjamin R. Tucker and Gertrude B. Kelly on Education

July 21, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
It’s a rare pleasure these days to stumble on something by Benjamin R. Tucker that I didn’t know was out there to find. When these items surface, it usually means some obscure radical journal or paper has surfaced. In this case, however, the source was the decidedly mainstream Educational Review, which dedicated half an issue in 1898 to “Some Socialist and Anarchist Views on Education.” Two of the contributors were political candidates of the Socialistic Labor Party, but the other two were figures familiar to readers of Tucker’s Liberty: Tucker himself and Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly. For the details, download […]
Corvus Distribution

Taking Wing: Games We Can’t Win

July 19, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
It is often said, in justification of the opportunities for monopoly, which our present business arrangements afford, that it is an encouragement to enterprise; and, that without such encouragement, all men would become drones and idlers.—Joshua King Ingalls, “Competition.” The model of competition that presently has us in its grip really comes pretty close to to that “inhuman struggle for the mastery, which characterizes all grades of business, under existing social conditions,” of which Ingalls complains. Aside from the obvious big-fish-eaten-by-bigger-fish stuff that is playing out in so many areas of business, at the level of the firm, one of […]
Corvus Distribution

Taking Wing: Dead end streets

July 6, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Back in December of last year, in the midst of the “conflation” debates, I posted a couple of articles about the retail book industry: “Who benefits most economically from state centralization?” and “there’s nothing wrong with competition.” In them, I talked a bit about the relative merits of the “big-box” and “small-box” models of bookselling, and started to talk about two competing visions of how “competition” can be thought about as an economic good. It’s tempting to relate the two models of competition to Dyer Lum’s distinction between “militant” and “industrial” types: on the one hand, we have the centralists’ […]
Corvus Distribution

Corvine Call #2 Liberty2.0 and Dyer D. Lum

July 3, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
The breadth of my interests is probably no surprise to anyone reading this blog, so nobody will be surprised that the archive I have accumulated is pretty diverse. But, given the really limited popularity of even the best-known of the figures that have been the special objects of my interest, it’s been a real question whether there was much point in pamphleting a lot of these folks. At the Portland Bookfair, I said a number of times that I would know I was on the right track if someone actually bought a copy of William Henry Channing’s “The Call of […]
Corvus Distribution

Corvine Call #1 Origins and Blazing Stars

July 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
“Waiting for a moment until another shellbark dropped, a blue-jay perched upon a bare twig and sang after its fashion. It was a short series of discordant notes; collectively, a harsh, rattling, corvine call, and yet it blended well with the gnarly branches and shaggy bark. Coarse, but honest to the core. There was nothing for mere appearance’s sake, such as gluts you in modern assemblages of men. The blue-jay is a bird murderer, but he does not care a whit who knows it. There is no stabbing in the back about him, and now that the spared nestlings of […]
Corvus Distribution

Taking Wing: Corvus Editions

July 1, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ll be writing much, much more about the project as it develops, but Corvus Editions, the first element of Corvus Distribution, is now open for business on the web. The brand new online shop contains 30 pamphlet titles, including some very classic bits of mutualist and individualist anarchist literature. I have an ambitious program of transcription, translation and publication laid out, and I’ve cut back my corporate employment to give me the time and energy to pursue it. My silence here over the last month or so has been directly related to my desire not to launch the new business […]