January 1st (Public Domain Day) is an appropriate date to reflect on my activities at monadnock.net. Although I started the site as a webzine called the Monadnock Review back in 1997, on the first of January in 2008 I relaunched it as a repository of public-domain texts that are consistent with your humble publisher's editorial vision. Since then I have republished dozens of works that are in the public domain (at least according to U.S. law), ranging widely across the literature of freedom and the classics of Western civilization, the Anglosphere, and America. 2012 was no exception in that regard: I posted works by Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Frederick Douglass, Epictetus, Baltasar Gracián, Thomas Jefferson, Lucian, Rudyard Kipling, John Stuart Mill, Plato, François de La Rochefoucauld, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Adam Smith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson, and Henry David Thoreau.
I also continue to inch closer toward publishing some of these works (and some of my own writings) as ebooks, and perhaps even in print. As one aspect of that effort, I have decided to change the name of this little publishing house from Monadnock Press to Monadnock Valley Press. Recently I discovered that there was a Monadnock Press active during the Arts and Crafts movement about a century ago, and that there is also a Monadnock Press currently active in New Hampshire. Because I don't wish to cause any confusion, changing the name to Monadnock Valley Press seems appropriate (although my publishing policy is more ecumenical than the somewhat Randian name might suggest).
I've also been thinking that it might be good to run this site (which after all is under source control at GitHub) a bit more like an open-source project, with semi-regular releases and a roadmap of future features. Currently, my plan is to post a number of works by Percy Bysshe Shelley in the relatively near future, concomitant with my continuing series of blog posts about "the poets of Epicurus" (which so far has covered Pessoa, Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, Swinburne, and Tennyson). This year I also plan to republish a few plays by Henrik Ibsen, perhaps in honor of his birthday on March 20. Another major project I have underway is a seriously hyperlinked version of the Ethics of Spinoza. It is also likely that I will republish several works by some of the authors I have already covered, such as Austen, Bourne, Franklin, Montaigne (in the John Florio translation), Plato, Swinburne, Tennyson, and Thoreau.
I'll post again here when I have further significant updates to report.