May brings two changes to sites where History of the Adepts research has been shared. Academia.edu now offers free access to the entire text and annotations for all letters received by Thomas Moore Johnson and published in two volumes in Letters to the Sage. Introductions by Patrick Bowen and Ronnie Pontiac, appendices by Erica Georgiades and myself, and illustrations are available only in the print and ebook volumes, but the letters themselves and the correspondent biographies can be examined here. The excerpts from Grimke, Astley, and Chintamon books have recently been expanded and updated as well.
For years at History of the Adepts I added many tags and created a tag cloud with several dozen names. As more posts were added this became more cumbersome, too much noise. When an upgrade required reconfiguring the menu, categories are at the top of the page rather than tags. This is more like a table of contents rather than an index, and increases the signal to noise ratio. Categories show posts about all authors who had been tagged ten times or more: in ascending order Alcott, Theon and Chintamon 10 each, Randolph 11, Wilder and Britten 14 each, Johnson 17, Benjamine 19, Astley 22, Stebbins 25, Burgoyne 34, Grimke 39. Clicking on their names on the menu displays all posts referring to them in reverse chronological order. Twelve author names and eleven individuals may be confusing, but combining the Burgoyne and Astley entries would be even more so. A post can be in more than one category, and often Burgoyne/Grimke, Astley/Stebbins, and Wilder/Johnson were tagged in the same posts as literary collaborators.