Half a hundred Libertys

I had some contact with John Ruch, a writer for the Jamaica Plain Gazette, awhile back. He had seen a letter from William Batchelder Greene to Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler, posted here. I gave him a general rundown on Greene’s life, and what I knew about his time in Jamaica Plain. His article, “Anarchy in JP,” is now available, and thanks largely to Dan Clore has been getting quite a bit of attention in anarchist circles. John did a very nice job, particularly as there are very few very complete biographical sources on Greene. (You can see my own first […]

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 […]

Henry Cohen published a number of editions of William Batchelder Greene’s Mutual Banking in the 20th century. The pieces of that particular bibliographic puzzle have been hard to assemble. Thanks to archive.org, we have at least one more piece: a digital facsimile of the 1919 edition by The Reform League of Denver, Colo. It’s available in a number of formats. Cohen’s editions closely follow the 1870 edition, with notes and an introduction by Cohen.