On being needy and such things

A few of you support our work by occasional contributions. You have no idea how helpful this has been. Left to himself, Bruce would never ask you for help. But I will.

We’ve located a collection of relevant – really important – booklets. These were all published in the early 1840s. We’ve been looking for these for over ten years. Usually when they are available they sell for 100-500 dollars each. So in the last ten years we’ve found one booklet by this publisher that we could afford. We have none of these.

A bookseller acquaintance told us of this lot. I’ve sold a sterling silver bowl. (I’m certain my great-great gramma doesn’t mind since she’s been dead for a long time.) Bruce sold a book signed to him by a well-known author. We’re left with $115.00 to raise in two days.

Usually when we let something go because we can’t afford it, it’s not a huge matter. This time it will be. These booklets all relate to the Millennarian movement, the source of Russell’s theology and prophetic viewpoints. We have never seen some of these, though we know they exist. Some are not listed in OCLC and are not on Worldcat.org. They’re that rare. And they are important.

It is up to you, of course, whether you can help out here or not. Time is short. Help if you can.

Contributions can be made to Bruce’s paypal. There is a contribution button on the private blog or you can use the contact email associated with this blog and I’ll direct you to the right place.

Our profoundest thanks to those who can help.

One of the pamphlets in the collection.

If you read Nelson Barbour the Millennium's Forgoten Prophet

you've met Mr. Habershon.

 

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Now, let me update you on progress. We have an afterward left to write. It will tell readers what to expect from volume two. We are not including an index with volume one. The index will appear at the end of volume two. We are deleting an essay on sources. The footnotes speak for themselves. Those sources that are especially unreliable are noted in the main text.

We’re eighty percent done with the last chapter. We’ve changed the outline twice. Some things we planned on including in it will appear in a more logical place in volume two. This chapter tells the story of Barbour and Russell’s separation in a more coherent and cogent way than it’s been told before. We include details never presented. We spent more time than it was worth trying to track down some of H. B. Rice’s papers. I finally found the person who was supposed to have them only to discover that they did not really exist. Still, we have a very clear history of Rice and will tell you what his role in this affair was.

We tell this story chronologically, so we interrupt the ransom-atonement arguments with events as they happened. Key intervening events are the prophetic conference of 1878, the Feltwell controversy, and Rice’s entry into the discussion. We’ve spent this past week clarifying some paragraphs and discussing what we’re including in the last section.