Freethought Librarianship

One of the most unique things we have at our CFI Libraries is our various freethought items.

From Wikipedia:

Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that beliefs should be formed on the basis of science and logic and not be compromised by emotion, authority, tradition, or any dogma. The cognitive application of freethought is known as freethinking, and practitioners of freethought are known as freethinkers.

(I shall discuss Wikipedia in a future blog, but suffice it to say that Wikipedia is usually a good starting point)

Anyway, we have a very good collection of these items, including some of the rarest, such as Ingersoll, Cohen, Joseph McCabe, Joseph Lewis, Bradlaugh, etc. A large portion of the rarest items have not yet been cataloged, but I am currently working on them.

There are very few of us out there any longer who maintain freethought collections, but University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has a "Social Protest" Collection, which is included within their scope, the American Atheists have some within their collection, and then we do. There are other places that have freethought as well, but these places have the largest and most well-known collections of these materials.

More Ingersoll!

Tom Flynn, curator of the Ingersoll Birthplace Museum, received a bunch of cool new items from a descendant of RGI. Included are what appears to be the printing plates from the Dresden Edition fronts pieces. Each is a different picture of RGI taken at a different point of his life.

Additionally, there are some rare pictures and a scrapbook put together by the family.

I have been asked to assist with one of the plates that is somewhat different from the others, and I will write more on that when I find out more.

Also, I will be cataloging some more Ingersoll items rather soon as we have a box of materials from the former library director (Gordon Stein) that was acquired about 10 years ago, but never cataloged.

We are also getting ready to put together an exhibition of artifacts from Dr R.V. Pierce, a mail order practitioner of nostrums that may or may not have been effective. This also ties into some articles coming out soon from Senior Research Fellow Joe Nickell, and my digitization project for the WNYLRC.

Cataloging is fun!!!!!

I am one of the very few people left in the world who catalog in a library. I mean catalog items from scratch, not copy catalog from OCLC or somewhere else. I do copy catalog out of OCLC for many items, but there is nothing like adding a record to OCLC or the library catalog that you have done yourself.

I have been going through a lot of rare items that have been cataloged prior to my arrival here at the Center. Once completed, every item will have been recataloged since my arrival. The old library director was not as much a librarian as a bibliophile, although he was an expert in the areas of freethought, humanism and some areas of the paranormal. So the catalog was not very good. He had students help him, but his knowledge of cataloging was not very good, so I had to redo everything.

I have found some rare Ingersoll sentiments, lectures and other related items recently. I will be going through all the rare items that have not been cataloged at all very soon, once I complete these old somewhat cataloged items.

I also found some works signed by Ernst Haeckel to TB Wakeman. Haeckel is a philosopher from around the turn of the 20th century. Wakeman is a freethought advocate and periodical publisher and lecturer. For more information on both, see The Encyclopedia of Unbelief.