Progress in archiving Liberty

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.

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 […]

At this point, I’m putting together “dummy” issues, with titles for all the major articles, and typing or scanning the bits that I think are most significant. I plan to put random free moments to work filling in the blanks in the early issues, while pushing ahead with the general reading and analysis. If anyone would like to help with the project, let me know and I’ll add you to the team. I’ve read through the issues for 1881 several times now, and am starting to get a feel for Liberty‘s beginnings. As I’ve mentioned before, the state of The […]