RDN’s archive sites

(1) The RDN blog you are now reading was started in 2008.

(2) Most of what I wrote and said during 1990-2008 is at my earlier site, now an archive: https://richarddnorth.com/archive.

(3) For several years (1995-2012) I ran a web project and business which I eventually called The Right Sites. By the end it had various manifestations which even now may serve as a model to someone:

https://richarddnorth.com/archived-sites/livingissues/
https://richarddnorth.com/archived-sites/theblackhistorymuseum/
https://richarddnorth.com/archived-sites/makingbettergovernment/

(4) Silvester Mazzarella, the distinguished translator of Italian and Swedish writing, wrote a fine biography of an antecedant of his, Alexander Bell Filson Young, always known and published as Filson Young. Silvester allowed me post this work online and it appears at:
https://richarddnorth.com/archived-sites/filsonyoung/

NB: I’m afraid that on the home page of the FY site, now fixed as an archive, I wrote – in error – that FY had been at the Battle of Jutland. Filson Young was not at the Battle of Jutland, but was with Beatty at the Battle of the Dogger Bank. I also said that Filson Young “discovered” James Joyce: this is a silly mistake. Filson Young did not discover James Joyce, but he did write a positive publisher’s reader’s account of a draft of Joyce’s Dubliners.]

(5) For some years I had a web-based avatar, Hugh Curtiss, with a website and Twitter account, around whom I considered weaving a novel or two. In the end, I decided that anonymity on the web was a bad thing, even as an ironic jape.

(6) I am currently engaged in downsizing my father’s library. But before I dispose of them, I want to honour two separate thoughts which matter to me. One is that my father’s library seems indicative of what a thoughtful man wanted on his shelves. What’s more, it happens that his parent’s generation included several close family members or friends of note, and my father seems to have thought that I would mark the fact. My father Paul A North (1912-2001) bought and cherished a good many books from childhood onwards. He was also given or inherited books bought by or given to his mother, Vera Bax (as she was when she died). These included volumes owned or written by, or concerning, her first husband, Stanley (latterly, Kennedy) North; her second husband, Filson Young (see above); her third husband, Clifford Bax; but also by a few well-known authors and given by them to her husbands or herself. Most of these books and a few others of note which I have bought over the years are accessible online at the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg or the Hathi Trust. I am thinking of sending several of these volumes to charity booksellers, since as physical objects they are not worth the space they take on my shelves.

You can email me at: rdnorth – “at” – richarddnorth.com