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 to archive Liberty in pdf form, working from John Zube’s microfiche edition. I have archived the first 65 or so issues already, and am working at a pace that ought to have a complete pdf archive of the first 14 volumes of Liberty together in roughly a month. Volumes 15-17 consist of issues in a format much easier to convert to text, and I have already begun the text-conversion process on those 13 issues. I am also in the process of converting the contents listings in Zube’s edition into a more usable form, as the beginnings of an archive index. Getting the basic archive together is really a matter of staying on top of the schedule, and being willing to do the scut work. Pdfs will allow everyone free access to the archive, and the completeness of Zube’s edition, which includes the issues of Libertas and some issues not found in the APS Online collection, means an improvement even for those with good academic access. Full-text searching is a ways away, as is the much-needed print reprint, but one step at a time.
I love the snarky deft writing that seems to be all over the place in Liberty. It was interesting, and a little disturbing, to see the knocks against women’s suffrage in issue 27 (Vol. 2, #1).
This is always something a little disturbing about anti-suffrage writing, even when it comes from a principled, and relatively sound position. It always pushes the very edge of simply being wrong. The same could be said these days about anti-state writing applied to those who don’t enjoy any of the protections of a state, such as the Palestinians. As an anarchist, I have deep concerns about suffrage as a “solution of the social problem” (as they used to say) and figure there are better solutions to current issues than state solutions. But you can go from snarky to glib to maybe not quite in touch with all the issues pretty easily, if you’re not careful…