The Travelling Library

The origins of the Travelling Library are unclear. The earliest materials appear to have been posted to CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie and other commercial information services (CIS), or to small dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) run by Masonic groups, and date back to the late ’80s or early ’90s. The provenance of essays from Masonic journals published in the early twentieth century cannot be established. Presumably someone, somewhere, digitised these essays and distributed them through CIS, Usenet, and BBS, and eventually through the WordWide Web.

At some point, attempts were made to collect this widely distributed material into a monolithic archive. This archive was passed from hand to hand, from BBS to BBS, from website to website. Along the way it grew exponentially.

The circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the Travelling Library are worth recording.

Approximately twenty years ago, the Travelling Library came into the hands of a Brother responsible for the creation and maintenance of his Grand Lodge’s website. This Brother was a practising Wiccan and made no secret of his beliefs. These beliefs came to the attention of an incoming Grand Master, who declared that Wicca was Satanism and proceeded to defame the Brother at every opportunity. This antagonism ended in a threat of expulsion from Masonry. The maligned Brother demitted from his lodge before he could be expelled and waited patiently for succeeding Grand Masters to take a more enlightened stand on a Mason’s private and personal religious beliefs. Some expressed sympathy but none countered the ruling that Wicca was Satanism and that neither should be allowed in Masonic lodges. [Read first-hand account]

Ostracised from mainstream Masonry in his own jurisdiction, the Brother moved the Travelling Library to a new website dedicated to discussion of Wiccan and Masonic topics. Neither of these sections saw much activity, most of the messages being posted by the Brother himself and consisting of updates to his Masonic status.

Eventually the Brother decided to turn away from Masonry and gave notice that he would close down the Masonic section of his website. He warned that the Travelling Library archive would be deleted, and that any website members wishing to save Masonic materials should download them as soon as possible.

With the permission of the Brother, the webmaster of the Skirret downloaded the entire Travelling Library and then spent several months converting the files to standard HTML format.

The original plan was to integrate these files into the Skirret Library. This plan had to be abandoned for three reasons.

Working through the Travelling Library, file by file, it became clear that some of the material was almost worthless. Some files deal with issues that are now irrelevant. Some are little more than illiterate and uninformed personal opinions or appalling Masonic doggerel penned for the newsletters of untraceable lodges.

Another problem was duplication. The Travelling Library contains large collections of back-issues of notable Masonic research journals. The quality of the material in these files is high, but the same files can be found on other websites (see Links page), though they are often badly formatted and poorly edited.

Finally, it has become clear that the system of categorisation adopted by the Skirret is unworkable. To give an example, the back-issues of the excellent Builder magazine deserve a category of their own, but some of the finer articles might be better placed in categories reflecting the content, not the source.

For these and several other reasons, the Skirret site will remain a collection of static files—a nightmare to code and organise, but easily accessible to search engines and resilient to changes in Web standards.