Google Books Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

The Ethics of the Homestead Strike

August 30, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

In his Liberty review of William Bailie’s The First American Anarchist, Clarence L. Swartz noted that, “Sidney H. Morse, the sculptor, was, during the last two years of Warren’s life, his most active propagandist. Furthermore, Morse’s efforts were so great that they did not fail of appreciation by Warren, and the latter showed his full recognition of their value by making Morse his literary executor.” Morse is one of those major figures who never seems to get quite the attention he deserves. He was the editor of The Radical, a contributor to The Radical Review, as well as to Liberty, […]

William Beck’s “Money and Banking”

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Money and Banking, Or Their Nature and Effects Considered (Cincinnati, 1839), published, and presumably written, by William Beck, was one of the major sources of William B. Greene’s mutual bank writings. It has also been the most difficult one to access in its entirety, since the microfilm, which is relatively common, has a number of unreadable pages, thanks to an early era of sloppy reproduction. A quick look suggests that this is one that Google Books got right. One more piece in place for the critical edition of Equality and Mutual Banking (1850), which will be my top priority, once […]

Proudhon and Tucker get psychedelic!

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Wow, man! Tucker’s edition of Proudhon’s The Malthusians, in a very special digital edition. Google Books raises the Art of Screwing Up to the level of, well, ART.

Too much anarchism at Google Books?

November 8, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Curiouser and curiouser. While doing some research on early appearances of the word “anarchism,” prior to 1870, I ran across numerous hits on Google Books for very early texts, many of them in French. Now, given the proof-reading and quality control issues I’ve blogged about before, it wasn’t out of the question that perhaps I was seeing some early use of the French word anarchisme, together with some sloppy OCR work, in, for example, Charles Fourier’s Traité de l’association domestique-agricole. But the search engine at Google Books informed me that the word anarchism appeared on thirty different pages in that […]

Google Books is hiding things again

July 13, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

More stupid search engine tricks. Back in May, I noted some peculiarities of Google Books’ search engines. If you follow the links from that original post, you will notice some new peculiarities, including the disappearance of the 1849 Amos E. senter edition of Equitable Commerce from the results for: inauthor:josiah inauthor:warren. That important edition is still available from Google Books; you can follow the link above to see what Equitable Commerce looked like before Stephen Pearl Andrews edited it. But it, and one other listing, no longer show up in a general search for Warren’s work. There are still five […]

stupid search engine tricks

May 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Specific searches get specific results. Right? It depends, actually. Here are a couple of examples: I was searching for a particular edition of one of Josiah Warren’s works, the full title of which is, believe it or not, The former title of this work was “Equitable Commerce”, but it is now ranked as the first part of True Civilization: a subject of vital and serious interest to all people; but most immediately to the men and women of labor and sorrow. This is not to be confused with the first book to be published as True Civilization an immediate necessity, […]