Guido before Guido

In among other more tedious tasks like fixing Power-of-Attorney for my Senior Coordinating Friend, for if I stop functioning properly before all the other tedious tasks are done, I am trying to get my writings in something more like order. To that end I have been trawling through old “Libertarian Alliance” (Tame, Micklethwait, Gabb tendency) pamphlets that I published in the 80s and 90s. Picking out mine, of course, but also making sure to grab the sadly few by Chris Tame, to whom I am now determined to pay further posthumous tribute even if it’s one of the very last things I do.

And, I came across a pamphlet with this at the top:

It’s Guido before Guido, first published in 1991.

Read any or all of it here.

My experience of Guido divides neatly into two chunks of time. There was the Why Don’t You phase, when he would beg us to do clever and more eye-catching things than we could be bothered with or had the propaganda talents to be doing. (He later has a spell doing a few Blog Posts for Samizdata, where he bent Perry de Havilland’s ear out of shape in the same way, this time about how blogging could and should be done. Alas the only mention of Guido now at the Samizdata sidebar is the link to Guido Fawkes.)

And then came the glorious and still continuing Screw-You-Idiots-I’ll-Do-It-Myself phase, that I for one have loved and grovellingly admired from the moment it kicked off. No way did I or Tame or Gabb, or even de Havilland, teach Paul Staines everything he knew. But we did help to create an environment in which Guido could watch, learn, listen, and then do his own wonderful thing.

Such recollections are not going to make me die happy. Like Tame, I would have preferred literal physical immortality. But such memories do soften the blow a little, if blow it is about to be.

7 thoughts on “Guido before Guido”

  1. Rob

    Serious thanks for that link. Because of all the stupid feuding (mea culpa and I intend writing about that Real Soon Now), typing “Libertarian Alliance” into the www unleashes ordeal by utter effing chaos. Most of us Leading Lights of all the various factions and fragments and remnants of the Libertarian Alliance now pretend like it never happened. Yet it did, and there were good consequences as well as bad.

    In among all the chaos, I recently failed to find that very link that you just posted. You just made my life work a whole lot better. Instead I found something saying I was “locked out” or some such bullshit, and assumed some curator had killed that link. So, thanks.

  2. Also, when the last factional split occurred at the Libertarian Alliance (the one that led to Tim Evans leaving) I made a snapshot of the LA website just in case it was taken down, and (as I am careful with backups) I have a copy of all the content that was on it at that time. This may or may not be identical to what Rob linked to, but I have it and am happy to send either of you a copy.

  3. Ok good!

    All the PDFs could be converted to web pages. A web site with everything categorised and searchable would definitely be possible.

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