Liberty Archives - Page 2 of 4 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Liberty Site update

July 21, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

401 issues of Liberty and Libertas are now available in the archive. That leaves only 10 issues of Liberty to go! I should be able to complete this phase tomorrow. Next up: A more complete proposal for The Liberty Site—a rather ambitious scheme to answer, hopefully in the positive, the question: Can Liberty be the mother of order?

Bits of Liberty’s History

July 12, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Labors of love are notoriously bad at paying the rent, and other work has been a little slow, so I’m digging into my personal archive a bit to keep a roof over my head while I work on the Josiah Warren book and Liberty archive. I was fortunate enough, some years ago, to pick up a lot of original issues of Liberty, along with a few related items: letterhead stationary from the Liberty offices and the portrait of Michael Bakunin which Tucker claimed was the first faithful likeness published in the United States. I have put one each of the […]

Burke + Warren, 1850

July 12, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

In an article on “Anarchism in England Fifty Years Ago,” reprinted in the February 1906 issue of Liberty, Max Nettlau discussed two very early anarchist publications printed in England. One of these was an edition of Edmund Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society, published By Holyoake and Co., in 1850, under the title The Inherent Evils of all State Governments Demonstrated. The particular interest in this edition of Burke’s work comes from the Appendix which followed it, probably the work of Ambrose C. Cuddon, in which Josiah Warren’s “system” (he hated the word but…) of equitable commerce is presented as an […]

Liberty Archive – update

June 26, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

The archive of Liberty is growing steadily. I passed the 1000-page mark today, which is about 1/3 of the run, in terms of actual pages; about 1/4 in terms of difficulty of scanning the material; and about 1/2 of the way in terms of the actual content of the paper. The response has been very encouraging. Wendy McElroy has offered her Index To Liberty as a means of wading into the archive in a more systematic manner, and it looks like we will be incorporating that index into the archive as it becomes more than just a pile of pdfs. […]

Left-libertarian archive task-force

June 25, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve just been contacted by a library student and market anarchist who is interested in joining forces on archiving public domain material from the market anarchist traditions. And I’m feeling like there is sufficient interest (based on the reception of the Lucifer and Liberty issues I have posted) to make some better organized and more accessible archive a present priority. A couple of folks here have expressed interest interest in helping with technical matters, hosting, scanning, kibitzing, etc. I’m probably going to set up a “task force” mailing list this weekend to start hashing out some kind of plan. If […]

Progress in archiving Liberty

June 25, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Volumes 1-4 of Liberty and 3 of the 8 issues of Libertas are now available in pdf. The archiving push has brought some offers of assistance. I am hoping to launch a MediaWiki-based site for group discussion and collaborative transcription of the archived material. More news on this, and on indexing for the archive, soon.

embarking again

June 21, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

The lesson here is to take on projects well-adapted to the conditions under which you expect to labor. Now, if only I could get to a place where I could predict those conditions from month to month, or even semester to semester. I’ve been doing a lot of work on this project, reading, scanning and transcribing material from Liberty and from related sources. I haven’t been doing it in a particularly systematic way—until this last week. Some rethinking has obviously been in order, so here’s a new, delightfully doable plan for the start of a relaunch here. I have begun […]

Liberty, Vol. 17, No. 1, April 1908

June 20, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

LIBERTY Proprietor: BENJ. R. TUCKER, 502 Sixth Ave., New York City Vol. XVII—No. 1 APRIL, 1908 Whole Number 403 ON PICKET DUTY Pride goeth before a fall. In the December number of Liberty I congratulated myself on having re-established my own composing-room. No later than January 10 this composing-room, together with the entire wholesale stock of my publications and nearly all my plates, was absolutely wiped out by fire. As I had deliberately refused to insure, because of the absurdly high rates now prevailing (the rate for the stock in my book-shop exceeds four per cent. a year), the loss […]

Half a hundred Libertys

June 18, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I stole a couple of hours today to work on the pdf archive of Liberty. No indexes, bells, or whistles yet, but the first fifty issues are now there for your enjoyment and edification.

More Lucifer, plus some Liberty

June 17, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Thanks to Jesse Walker at Reason Hit & Run and the folks at boing boing for making my rather off-hand announcement of the budding Lucifer the Light-Bearer archive something of a hit in the blogosphere. Apparently the interest is out there, so I’ve been adding to the archived issues as time allows: 52 down, and only 1057 issues to go! I’ve also begun an archive of Benjamin R. Tucker’s Liberty in pdf form, scanning from John Zube’s microfilm edition. Again, the quality is not perfect, and in some cases is not even particularly good, but hopefully I can put something […]