Needs and progress

We are maybe two weeks away from finishing the rough draft of chapter 8, the last chapter of volume one of the new book. It will need proof reading and revision. We have an afterward to write, and I haven’t written my introduction. Bruce is revising his.      We’re now looking ahead to volume two. It’s about half finished. We will need access to several items for it to represent “best research.” We have located a number of issues of Jones’ Day Star. The microfilm cost is over three hundred dollars. We don’t have that. Because they’re the last issues, we are not certain of relevance. If any of you live in the Washington, D.C., we could use your help. We need someone to turn the pages of the bound volume looking for relevant items.  

This is a poor solution. Most of you won’t really know what’s relevant unless it has Russell or Paton’s name on it. But many other things are relevant. Best solution would be for us to buy the microfilm and read it through ourselves. This is simply not possible.

We have a continuing need for letters by or to Russell no matter how irrelevant they may seem.

One of our blog readers asked for a list of what we need. I think the most pressing things right now are opposition booklets from 1910 and before. Most of these are on the “icky” side, but some contain relevant comments. Email me first. If we have something, it would waste your time to scan and send it.

H. B. Rice’s Last Trump is important. We know of no copies. If you can locate one let me know.

We have copies of a few of J. H. Paton’s letters. They’re not very relevant. One comes from a major university. I’d tell you which, but I honestly can’t remember at the moment. Harvard, I think. We found it in an archive of someone else’s papers. All it tells us is that he wrote to that individual. It’s two short sentences long. But it’s important to us to know that he exchanged letters with someone. It fills in missing bits of the picture.

Mr. Schulz has written a letter re-requesting permission to publish two photos. This is a follow up to an email that went unanswered. If you have photos that you think may be helpful and want to share them (with permission to publish if we want), send them as an email attachment.

Another important issue is Watch Tower readers’ expectations for 1881. This was part of a larger speculation about that year driven by a widely believed but fake Mother Shipton prophecy and by something in one of Smyth’s pyramid books. We will need newspaper articles about prophetic expectations for that year, including comments on the great yellow day.

Watch Tower teaching entered several countries in the period before 1887. The Year Book histories are often wrong when they present “earliest date” information. We need someone to carefully read through the early issues of Zion’s Watch Tower for references to lands other than the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. References up to 1900 are relevant. We also need references to early-days congregations, preferably that consider the years before 1900.