Check Out These Online Libraries
Table of Contents
I’ve generally moved back to reading paper books (physical objects play better with mnemonics than digital artifacts), but I still find value in ebooks and essays, though more for leisure reading or for researching things I might want to delve into more deeply in the real world.
Here are nine archives I’ve enjoyed over the years.
1. Online Library of Liberty
The OLL is one of my favorite online resources for classic political works. It’s got a little bit of everything and you can download books in a variety of formats.
This is a great place to find free digital versions of ridiculously expensive out of print books. I grabbed the entire digital library back when it wasn’t divided into collections, and sometimes I’ll just pick a random title to read, since you don’t know what you don’t know.
2. Gutenberg.org
The Gutenberg Project is probably the most famous public domain electronic library. With over 75,000 titles, it contains more books than you can read in a lifestime. It’s selection is enormous.
It offers ebooks in a variety of formats, and sometimes that even includes audio book versions. If you have an e-ink reader, there’s really no reason not to download a dozen literary classics from Gutenberg for your device. I use Calibre to help manage my public domain ebook collection.
3. Archive.Org
The internet archive is a bit of a mixed bag. It has millions of texts and digitized books, and that means a lot of junk has found its way on to the site. Finding what you want might take a bit more effort, but given the breadth of its offerings it’s often worth the work.
I would have never read the Didascalion without the internet archive, which is a classic treatise on the liberal arts by Hugh of St-Victor, one of the patron saints of mnemonics. The Didascalion is out of print and hardcover copies can easily go for over $100, which would have been too steep a price for me to pay without having read the book first. Now I’ll eventually shell out the money for a hard copy version.
That’s one of the ways I like to use e-libraries: to see if expensive out of print books are worth adding to my own library.
4. Librivox
Librivox offers a large selection of public domain audio books. I’m not the biggest audio book guy anymore, but I went through a phase where I listened to a lot of them, and that included some librivox ones. There’s some gems on here, and if you’re a heavy podcast listener, you might benefit from switching out some podcasts for some heavier listening.
5. Bartleby’s Harvard Classics
Before the internet archive was a thing, I made ample use of Bartleby’s version of the Harvard Classics. You can find pdf and epub versions of these works now on the archive, but i’ll always have a found place in my heart for the Bartleby offerings.
Everyone should read the Harvard Classics at least once.
It’s a fantastic selection of classical works curated by one of Harvard’s former deans, Charles W. Eliot, back in 1909. The idea behind the “Harvard classics” was to give everyone the opportunity to receive a classical liberal education.
One of my greatest regrets is that I’ve only recently learned how to harness the power of mnemonics in a way that allows me to digest book. When I first read the Harvard Classics, the works almost just passed right through me, like most reading did. Bits and pieces of them would stick, but I failed to develop a full mastery of the literature, or at least a model of the works that I could carry with me wherever I went.
I’m going to eventually revisit these works and give them the treatment they deserve. I might even start a Harvard Classics read-along class for other people who don’t just want to read the books, but remember them too.
Until then, if you’re ever in want of a book to read, you could do worse than working through Eliot’s 5 foot bookshelf.
6. BBS Textfiles
I was a BBS kid growing up, which stands for bulletin board services. In the digital stone ages, people would log into each other’s computers over phone lines using modems. They would then post on forums and download files. Modems used to be ridiculously slow, so your downloads were limited to tiny little things, like text files.
My love of ebooks can be traced to the hours I spent crawling file archives on various bulletin boards. A lot of these text files were of an… antisocial character. It’s where I found my first copy of the “anarchist cookbook”, a work of mischief that’s now banned in various countries.
I was introduced to serious political theory when I first logged on to theinternet to search for “anarchist text files”. I was expecting the kind of nonsense you could download off a BBS, but instead I found the writings Bakunin, Goldman, and Kropotkin nestled side by side on a University website that also shared links to more traditional political theory.
BBS text files inadvertently lead to my own political awakening, and brought me into the world of philosophy and educational psychology.
These days, the text files are just curious artifacts of a bygone era, but they’ll always bring a smile to my face.
7. The Franklin Papers
Benjamin Franklin is one of my greatest influences. When I was a teenager, my main model was Michael Bakunin, but Franklin was always there in the background casting his shadow, even if he didn’t have pride of place yet.
Franklin and Bakunin both shared a lot in common. They were pragmatists instead of theorists, so neither of them ever wrote any great masterworks. Instead they lived their politics. They organized. They hustled in the real world.
Of the pair, Franklin was significantly more effective, and I’ve come to believe that’s because his political programme was the better one. Bakunin never built anything that lasted, and his chief contribution to the world was breaking up the First International and keeping Marx in check while he was alive.
Franklin though, was a builder. He built libraries, fire stations, and post offices. He invented bifocals and lightning rods. He even created a weird musical instrument like the glass harmonica. The guy got things done.
I think I’d have been much happier had I gave Franklin the spot I had given Bakunin as a teenager, but that’s just how things go. We tend to be impulsive brats when we’re younger, and young men often value the fight more than the peace that follows it.
The Franklin Papers collects all the essays and articles that Benjamin Franklin published through his life. It’s worth noting just how sharp he was even as a young boy.
8. Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty Newspaper Archives
Benjamin Tucker ran Liberty, an anarchist newspaper, in Boston back in the late 1800s. Liberty captures a very specific strand of American thinking that has deeply influenced my own.
Tucker is one of America’s most important libertarian theorists, but his libertarianism is at odds with what you’d usually associate with the term. His approach is much closer to the European version of the concept, given that he was heavily influenced by Proudhon, and that’s why you can find the writings of anarchists like Kropotkin in the pages of his paper. Tucker even argued in favor of unionization, which is not a view you’d associate with todays libertarians.
American libertarianism, or “individualist anarchism”, can partly be traced back to the ideas of the Englishman Robert Owen and his one-time American disciple Josiah Warren, who was Tucker’s mentor.
Individualist anarchism would eventually break into a variety of factions, one of which occurred over the issue of natural law. Benjamin Tucker’s circle was critical of it, while Lysander Spooner’s faction supported natural law as the basis of political order. The Spooner faction is, I think, closer in spirit to today’s American libertarian movement, while many of the ideas of Tucker’s faction have been expelled from it.
Tucker’s faction didn’t die out, though. It just became something else. Robert Anton Wilson was once a member of a Tuckerist libertarian commune, and he would take Tuckerism to California where he networked with like minded weirdos. Their ideas would go on to shape radical politics for decades. Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, R.U Sirius, Hakim Bey, and countless others in their expanded network can be considered heirs of the Boston Anarchists, even if they themselves are unaware of that influence.
Their politics would shape the counter-culture that made California such a dynamo for so long. Silicon Valley wouldn’t look the way it does if it hadn’t been for the work Tucker had done in the pages of Liberty.
The argument I just outlined above is not a common one, but I think the evidence is there to back it up.
9. Sacred Texts
Finally, we’ve got the Sacred Text archives. I used to love reading through the works on this site decades ago. I can’t remember a darn thing about what I read in those pages, but I know I had a lot of fun reading about the strange and amazing things tha others used to believe.
I’m a big fan of Robert Anton Wilson, and he had this practice of putting on “different heads”, or trying to see the world through the eyes of people with distinctly different metaphysics or experiences of reality.
How does the world look if you live according to the lunar or mayan calendar? What if you really believed what the Romans or Persians did back in 500 B.C? Sacred Texts has a collection of world views that are just so far away from how moderns mostly interpret reality.
Sacred Texts is a great site for “putting on heads”, a mental experiment I recommend everyone try to do. Epistemic humility is going to be one of the through lines for this newsletters, so I’ll always take the opportunity to have readers ask “what if you’re wrong about absolutely everything?”