Comments Elsewhere

Anyone got much in the way of online or offline resources about Iniciales (“la revista de los espiritus libres”, 1929-1937)?

It’s a Catalunian/Spanish individualist anarchist magazine, which lists topics as “Anarchist Individualism, Naturism and Eugenics [sigh], Voluntary and Conscientious Procreation, Sexology.” Thought of L’en dehors as “French colleagues.” Recently ran into them through a pamphlet they published in ’36 or ’37 translating Laurance Labadie’s “Is Communism Sound?” into Spanish (“Es practicable el comunismo?”)

is trying to figure out the best way to render Clarence Swartz’s freaky typographical choices into HTML/CSS. (I could just happily ignore the whole thing, but of course a section of nearly every issue of the magazine talks about the latest batch of letters he has gotten complaining about said freaky typographical choices, and defending them against their detractors, all of which is … puzzling … unless you can see what he was doing.)

My recent trip to the Labadie Collection was largely for gathering information and notes on American individualists and mutualists operating in the decades after the end of Liberty and Tucker’s retirement to Europe. (So, e.g., a lot on Clarence Swartz’s activities, Herman Kuehn’s Instead of a Magazine, the work of Laurance Labadie, etc.)

Based on this research, I believe the award for the most name changes in a single periodical run will have to go to Edward H. Fulton, who began publishing The New Order in 1919, and ended up publishing The Mutualist in 1928. In between, the publication was called: The New Order (1919), 1776 American (1920), Ego (1921, 1923), The Egoist (1924-1925), and The Mutualist (1925-1928). Really, for all I know it may still be publishing, having gone through another 40 or 50 names in the interim; I ran out of time in Michigan before I ran out of boxes requested from the Labadie.

is back in Alabama.

1. I think that if you want to help readers focus on the content column, that’s a noble goal, but as a couple of people have remarked, the fuzzed and greyed-out text in the far-right column actually hurts that rather than helping it. It’s actually intensely distracting, for the same reason that something moving in your peripheral vision is intensely distracting — it’s visible enough to attract attention but not visible enough to be processed and filtered out, so it keeps pulling your eyes over towards it in order to try and make out what it is. Solid black text would be far easier to visually filter.

2. My other recommendation, if you want to emphasize center-column content, is that you just get rid of all of the social media barf at the bottom of the post. In the new theme it is much more distracting than previously, because the theme as a whole has far less color and chrome, and so the things that stand out most brightly from the mostly-monochrome background (far brighter than the article text) are the highly-colored social networking service logos. This is jarring and makes it hard to read what’s above it. The widgets are in any case meaningless for people who don’t use these services; and not necessary for people who do use them (since people who use a social networking site will typically have it open already in another tab, and can copy and paste the URL over quickly enough. Cf. also http://informationarchitects.net/blog/sweep-the-sleaze/ …)