The Walter Karp Library

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A Brief Story about this Archive

My father co-founded The Public Life: A Bi-Weekly Journal of Politics in 1968 and worked tirelessly to publish it until March 1971. My sister Jane was born in September 1971, so those were the honeymoon years between my parents getting married in November ’68 and starting a family.

Our own set of print copies of The Public Life was woefully incomplete. My father maintained a copy of all his articles published in magazines such as Horizon, American Heritage, Harper’s, Esquire, and Channels, but had somehow not held on to every issue of his own journal. In thinking about how to fill in the gaps in our collection, I recalled receiving a funny little postcard when I was in high school from a small press archive located at a state college in Wisconsin. The card asked if I could send them 2 copies of each issue of The Free Spirit, a student-run newspaper I had started (and that was inspired in part by The Public Life.) I wondered how in the world did a newspaper archive halfway across the country know about our little student run newspaper!

Perhaps this archive also kept copies of The Public Life. After a little bit of sleuthing on the internet, I found the Wisconsin-based archive and reached out to them. It turned out, they did have a complete set of The Public Life and could scan every page and email the files to me for a nominal fee. So thanks to the work of some very diligent archivists who care about small, independent journals, I am able now to share a complete digital archive of The Public Life: