Free books! I love ’em.
Shawn Wilbur has done amazing work making individualist anarchist works available online, especially as regards banking; check out a sample here.
Another good thing: the IHS has put the old libertarian bibliographical review Literature of Liberty online. Conical hat tip to K-dog.
K-dog wonders why IHS has not promoted this. Bizarre.
Shawn is doing a great job. I give him a lot of credit for digging in on the early 19th century radical movement in America. You almost have to specialize in their writings to get a good feel for both the periodicals that are important and the way that they use language, which is often disconcerting. I haven’t seen him check up on the Boston Investigator in its many reincarnations, but I’m sure that it will be one of the next ones that he picks up on.
A long-time friend of mine who died a few years ago, Gordon Stein, had done a lot of work on most of the figures that Shawn is covering, albeit from the freethought side. He, George H. Smith and I had spend a lot of time digging around on the people. Gordon had a doctorate in library science and was great in uncovering sources of material.
By the way, if you want to go back another century, a lot of the hard-core English deist (and libertarian) writings can be found now online courtesy of GOOGLE BOOKS (not trying to write their ad copy, just sounds like it). Look up Thomas Chubb, for example on google books on full book search, and you can find a treasure trove. William Wollaston’s “Religion of Nature Delineated” is there, too!
Cheers!
Just Ken
http://classicalliberalism.blogspot.com/
Great news re Literature of Liberty. It is one of Leonard Liggio’s immortal contributions to liberty.
Roderick,
The new blog looks great. Thanks to you and Ken for the nice words. I’ll probably be slowing down a little bit in 2007 to do some writing on the mutual banking tradition.
Ken, all of that Google Books stuff needs ferreting out and sifting through. I’m slowly working my way through the Proudhon-related texts, noting which are complete and which are corrupt. There is so little quality control on that project. If folks would just dig in where their interests fall, we could probably compile some useful guides to the works of libertarian interest.
-shawn
Shawn,
Yes, the Google Books is quite frustrating. I was working through a lot of the books there and had come up with several hundred of varying quality, with some of them great finds. Unfortunately, I was about 2/3 through the list and my computer crashed and lost the info (should have saved it to a jump drive). That threw me, as it was part of a project that I’m doing on Charles T. Sprading, S.P. Andrews and Spencer Heath. Have just been too ill this summer to get back on track.
Finally got my internet connection going but my computer is having some distinct RAM problems which are nearly beyond me at this time to do much about. Once my health is on the improve, I should have a number of things of interest out.
Cheers!
Just a thought.
Just Ken