Libertarian Labyrinth Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Archive Adjustments

July 29, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

[dropcap]Time[/dropcap] passes, and projects that were serving some useful purpose in the larger work no longer seem so vital. The various archives in the Libertarian Labyrinth are no exception to this rule. So, after one of my periodical reassessments, several archival projects are merging with others. As I have noted in the past, the Labyrinth has always been a bit like leaving my file cabinets open on the internet–a working archive, rather than a formal exhibit, with all of the problems and untidiness you might expect from such a project. But it has allowed me to share a large amount […]

The Impact of the Cost Principle (and Archive Upgrades, VII)

November 17, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s been sort of a hard week to stay on task, with constant new developments in the Occupy movement and multiple live streams to follow. I’ve also been approached, out of the blue, to collaborate on a Charles Fourier translation that sounds like enough fun to shuffle some things to make room for it in my workflow. As it happens, more of a focus on Fourier will undoubtedly help with projects like Dejacque’s Humanisphere and Proudhon’s Creation of Order, so I’m grateful for the distraction. And work on the archive is still moving right along. I’m at about 525 COinS-equipped […]

Archive upgrades, VI

November 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

Some days the archive work seems to go very slowly, despite the fact that I’m spending 40+ hours each week now doing very little but research, data entry, COinS generation and other tasks directly related to getting the Labyrinth archive straightened out and hammered into a more usable shape. And, ultimately, that’s coming along well enough that I can probably turn most of my attention towards the now-looming Benjamin R. Tucker archive project, and start puttering away at translations again. So here’s your archive update: Max Baginski, “Without Government,” Mother Earth 1, no. 1 (March 1906): 20-26. B. W. Ball, […]

Archive upgrades, V

November 1, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

There’s no escaping the fact that some of what is necessary in this process of turning my online filing cabinet into a working archive is pretty slow going, and pretty dull stuff. That’s undoubtedly apparent to readers who see dump after dump of bibliographic listings without necessarily seeing much change in the Libertarian Labyrinth itself. But there’s a kind of geometric progression involved in the transformation of data into information, and more and more often now I’m finding that when I consult my various sources for something simple, like a volume or page number, I’m coming back with completely new […]

Archive upgrades, IV

October 29, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

The week was full of the right kinds of interruptions: A couple of research requests I had out bore fruit, and gave me plenty of productive distractions from the ongoing archive clean-up. Barry Pateman, of Kate Sharpley Library, hooked me up with a file of old card catalog data for Mother Earth, which I’ve started to transcribe and integrate into the archive. I got a chance to talk through some difficult points of the “Essence of Mutualism” article that I’ve been working on with a knowledgeable drinking buddy. And a couple more Benjamin Tucker-related sources turned out to be a […]

Archive upgrades, III

October 22, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Libertarian Labyrinth clean-up advances, step by step: I’ve made it through the “A”s in a roughly linear fashion—with lots of side trips to deal with all the old problems, new listings and such that naturally appear. And I’ve been simultaneously digging out and organizing my paper files, which can be a little daunting, since my print-outs of Bolton Hall articles (mostly one-page parables) amount to a 5” stack all by themselves. Since I’m taking the time to verify citations with the original sources where I can, it’s been an opportunity to rapidly refresh my memory about a lot of […]

Archive upgrades, II

October 20, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

A thousand is a lot, when it is a thousand articles that have to be checked for complete citations, typos, and formatting, and assigned to enough categories and index pages to be findable. The work on cleaning up and standardizing the Libertarian Labyrinth archive has already been both a lot of work and a lot of fun. As I’ve mentioned before, much of my accumulation of texts has been done at times when there was little leisure, or too much distraction, to take as much time with them as I would have liked. So while I’ve been doing a lot […]

Archive upgrades

September 25, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

I am gradually bringing some long-term bibliographic projects up to the point where it will make sense to publish them. While I’m still a long way from having tracked down all the work by Josiah Warren, or Joshua King Ingalls—or even William Batchelder Greene—I have reached the point where I feel like the major works are located, and I can give some useful indications of what remains to be unearthed. The goal is a series of annotated reader’s guides, ranging in scale from extremely modest to quite extensive, and one important step towards the goal is to transform the Libertarian […]

Unfinished business of Liberty

April 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Benjamin Tucker, like a lot of us, took on a lot of projects, not all of which came to fruition. His “Proudhon Library” and the pamphlet version of Bellegarrigue’s “Anarchy: Journal of Order” are among those announced, but never completed. In some other cases, what Tucker translated from his wide reading of libertarian literature was just the tip of the iceberg, where fascinating material was concerned. It will take some time before anything like the “Proudhon Library” is possible, but one of the reasons for pursuing the updated Libertarian Labyrinth is precisely to pursue those kinds of projects. And some […]

“Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle”

April 15, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

A lot of my work right now is sifting through archives, trying to gather together links to the works of various key socialist writers: Proudhon, Leroux, Colins, Considerant, Fourier, Briancourt, Ott, etc., etc. Some of the sifting is easy: all 47(!) volumes of the Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin are available at Gallica. In other cases, it’s a matter of sorting through the rubble at Google Books. Of course, the difficulties involved mean that my searches have been a bit more inclusive than they might otherwise be, and that has paid some handsome dividends. For example: Les Révolutions du XIXe […]