I’ve just come back from visiting the Kate Sharpley Library in California. Things have
changed from the days when I could get there on the bus and we were buying our first
filing cabinet. Lots of filing cabinets now, as well as boxes like the Left Bank Books
archive. It’s good to look at the non-fiction shelves, seeing ‘old friends’ and new
acquisitions. --- There’s always plenty of filing and organising to do which occasionally
throws up a gem: did you know Walthamstow’s Ambrose Barker was in touch with Max Charnick
(Chernyak) in Buenos Aires? It’s good to put runs of newspapers into acid-free boxes. This
is the ‘preserve’ part of us ‘preserving and promoting anarchist history’. Of course,
those boxes cost an arm and a leg, so you have to choose who gets preserved. A couple of
1970s French pamphlets gave up their Mylar protective pockets to some 1920s Italian
...