[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
1. Shawn Wilbur is God!
He has just completed posting the entire run of Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty in PDF form. Details here.
At the height of its popularity Liberty had a circulation of perhaps 600. Now, thanks to Shawn, it is accessible to millions worldwide.
The interface is bare-bones at the moment, but Shawn has plans for text-search capacity and other cool stuff.
As he urges: “download, download, download!” to ensure that “there is never again any question of Liberty not being available.”
I’ve also hailed the advent of Liberty on the Mises Blog.
2. Another gift from Shawn Wilbur: a list of Proudhon texts available on Google Books.
You may ask: What’s so special about that? Can’t anyone compile such a list by going to Google Books and doing an author search on Proudhon?
No. Having tussled with the unpredictable quirks of Google Books myself, I can sympathise with the woes Shawn describes here and here.
3. On an entirely unrelated topic, those planning to attend the Alabama Philosophical Society may need a reminder that the deadline for submitting a paper is just over two weeks away.
1. Umbridge and Lovegood were perfect!
I remember a visit to an Idaho Falls bookstore some time in the 1970s. Among the books that caught my eye I recall four: the first two Pern books by Anne McCaffrey, and the second and fourth Venus novels (the only ones they had) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. My mother and I picked out so many books on that visit that we had to put half of them on layaway; so I went home with Dragonflight and Lost on Venus, and then had to wait impatiently for Dragonquest and Escape on Venus the following month. I’d never read Burroughs before (I owned Tarzan of the Apes but had never opened it) but I quickly became a fan, tracking down those Ace paperbacks with the wonderful Frazetta covers. Soon I was writing my own comics (which I presumably still have somewhere) of Barsoom, Amtor, and Pellucidar. (My art was not quite as good as Frazetta’s.)
While I discovered Burroughs through his own books, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard I at first came to indirectly, through comic books – both in adaptations of their actual stories (for Lovecraft I remember “Pickman’s Model” and “The Music of Erich Zann”; for Howard, “The Right Hand of Doom,” “Dig Me No Grave,” and various Conan stories) and Lovecraftian/Howardian touches in original comics like The Phantom Stranger, Swamp Thing, The Unexpected, and Claw the Unconquered. After stories like “The Doom That Came to K’dasha-dheen,” I would inevitably feel a sense of familiarity when I eventually discovered Lovecraft’s Kadath, Dylath-leen, and “The Doom That Came to Sarnath.” Even Arkham Asylum in Batman prepared me to expect the worst from Arkham, Massachusetts. (Similarly, I read Jonah Hex before I saw any Clint Eastwood westerns – so when I finally saw the latter they had an unintended familiarity.)