It’s getting closer! I haven’t been wasting my yearly sabbatical, but have been expanding American Quaker War Tax Resistance into a snazzier and beefier edition. I just sent off for a proof copy to review yesterday:
More than half of the 350+ documents in this collection are new to the second edition. With some typographical fine-tuning and a little editing, though, I’ve managed to keep the page count (and thereby the price) down; the new edition is only about 15% thicker than edition 1.
Of course, everything is thoroughly indexed and cross-referenced, which is the big advantage of the book over trying to hunt through the individual documents here at The Picket Line or elsewhere on-line. A good, human-tuned subject-matter index is a marvelous thing, and a Google-like search for words or phrases is really no substitute.
I’ve also dated each document in the collection, based on the date or dates of the episodes it covers, and I’ve included these dates in the page headers and organized the documents chronologically, so it’s easier to flip to a particular period of time if you are hunting for, say, resistance at the time of the War of 1812.
I’ve also expanded my introduction, which gives you some context and shows you some of the themes that run through many of the documents in the collection.
The new cover art is a tribute to the quote from the journal of Joshua Evans: “I found it best for me to refuse paying demands… which went to pay the expenses of war: and although my part might appear but as a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I considered, was made up of many drops.”
It’s not ready to be ordered yet. If past experience is any guide, I’ll discover at least one glaring flaw while looking over the printed proof that escaped me in the PDF or layout software versions and I’ll need to cycle through the proof process again. But it won’t be long now.
