My friend Barry Pateman, of the Kate Sharpley Library, recently provided me with the raw data for an index of Mother Earth magazine. I had a couple of very specific questions that I needed to answer, but looking through the listings reminded me that I had gone as far as copying the contents pages for the full run and starting to digitize them some years back. I set myself the task of at least typing in the listings for a handful of major figures—Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, C. L. James, etc. As it turns out, I managed to accomplish a lot more than that.
The complete author listings—minus a few unsigned reviews, which were slightly out of place anyway, plus a couple of omissions I caught in this first stage—are now available in the Libertarian Labyrinth archive. I’ve created a category for Contributors to “Mother Earth”, with “contributions” including reprints, and typed in bibliographic entries for every article. Some are incomplete, and it is possible that there are still a few uncaught errors. About 60% of Mother Earth is accessible online in various archives, and I have verified every entry I could, adding full page-ranges where the entries only had starting-pages, etc. In a later phase I’ll do the necessary travel to compare the remaining entries to the actual issues—possibly in connection with more digitization.
Obviously, this is one more element in my campaign to transform the Libertarian Labyrinth into a much more useful and scholarly resource. I’m currently exploring the possibilities, but I expect to be doing quite a bit more of this sort of work, and to be concentrating quite a bit of my energy on my Mother Earth-related work through at least the first quarter of 2012.
Author listings for The Rebel, in a similar state, can also be found in the archive.
[Also available: a bibliographic listing of Mother Earth articles, organized by author.]
