As 2006 draws to a close

Looking back at my goals for the 2006 scanning project, I can quite happily say that I have exceeded the 3000 original pages which I had hoped to add to the archive—and that I have to say that it’s a rather different 3000 pages than I projected. We’ll see how this last month goes, but it looks like the total will be closer to 5000 pages. I anticipate coming at least very close to finishing the William B. Greene works, and some of those connected works, like Beck’s Money and Banking and some additional work by Kellogg, without which the collection of mutual bank writings which is 2007’s Big Project will be tough to complete.

The interesting story is probably all those things that did get scanned that I didn’t even know about back at the beginning of the year: Thomas Mendenhall’s pre-Kellogg bank writings, Paul Brown’s work, Jenny d’Hericourt’s critique of Proudhon, various bits of biographical material on William B. Greene, William Van Ornum’s currency reform pamphlet, the “Mutualist” letters, material from The Index and The Word, Lewis H. Blair, How to Escape the Coin Monopoly, etc. There’s a lot of sorting and indexing work to do to make all these bits and pieces accessible, and writing to do to make the fragments into history, but, if nothing else, this year’s harvest will have dramatically enriched the context in which we see the “canonical” texts of the individualist anarchist tradition. And that feels just fine.

I’m going to set myself one more little challenge: to finish up as many of those specific texts I singled out in April as time will allow. Check back with me in a month.