Each American Grand Lodge publishes its Constitution, statutes, and general laws in a printed volume called The Code. It also publishes its own version of The Standard Monitor, and may include this in The Code, or may publish it separately. The Monitor is that part of the Ritual which is called The Exoteric Work; along with it are included ceremonies for Opening and Closing the Lodge, ceremonies for Installation of Officers, forms for funeral services, forms for laying of corner-stones, and for dedication and consecration of Lodges and Lodge buildings, forms for documents and reports, etc. Some ten or twelve Grand Lodges have published Digests of their laws in which compendiums of laws, decisions, and edicts are logically arranged and indexed for ready reference. A large number of them have published official histories, biographies, and anniversary volumes. Each and every Grand Lodge, and as a part of its regular order of business, publishes each year a complete report of its regular and special Grand Communications in a volume called Annual Proceedings, or by some other title which carries the meaning of an annual report.
Thus if in a period of twenty-five years a Grand Lodge publishes five volumes such as The Code, or publishes new editions of such volumes, and at the same time publishes thirty volumes, if that is multiplied by 49, the number of Grand Lodges in the United States, it means that Grand Lodges alone are responsible for the publication of 1470 printed volumes in each period of twenty-five years. Since the Grand Bodies of the Capitular, Cryptic, Templar, and Scottish Rites publish volumes of a similar kind, the Masonic Fraternity as a whole in the United States publishes between three and four thousand printed books each twenty-five years, or from twelve to sixteen thousand each century. Each of these books is authoritative because it is written and published officially. Any question which asks what American Masonry does or does not do, advocates or opposes, believes in it or does not believe, can be answered in these volumes, and can be answered nowhere else. It is in these Grand Bodies that the rank and file of American Masons discuss their state or their national affairs, make decisions concerning the whole of the Fraternity, and place themselves on record. Therefore their decisions and their acts are found exclusively in the reports published by those Grand Bodies.
Each of the Lodges keeps a Minute Book which is to it what Annual Proceedings are to a Grand Lodge, although it never publishes them; also it has a copy of its own By-Laws, and these usually are printed. Also a Lodge may publish a history of itself, a biographical brochure of one of its own members, or anniversary volumes. Many Lodges print monthly bulletins; a few of them publish weekly or monthly periodicals, or do so in association with other Bodies. The twelve or fifteen Research Lodges publish their treatises and papers in regular or in occasional volumes. A number of Side Orders, or Clubs, or Associations, or Study Circles, or Research Societies publish booklets and periodicals.
A Grand Body, a local Body, or an auxiliary Body may share in, or sponsor, or officially approve periodicals or books written by individual Masons, or by voluntary Masonic groups; books of this category fall below official publications, and yet are not wholly without official sanction. A few books which are written by Masons privately, and are published by the author or some publishing house unofficially, are used so often by Masons and by Masonic Bodies, and by common consent are accepted as having so much authority, that they are to some extent and in effect, official books - Mackey's volume on jurisprudence is the most famous instance. Some of the Standard Monitors officially used by Grand Bodies were edited and published unofficially by private Masons. If the books published by Grand Bodies, by Auxiliary Bodies, by semi-official bodies, and by private Masons which have official or semi-official sanction are added to the books published by Grand Bodies the total number will not fall far short of 1000 titles per year.
The fact disposes at one stroke of the question whether or not it is lawful to publish books about Freemasonry, or as to whether the Fraternity has a literature of its own; if a Fraternity is publishing in one form or another, or for one purpose or another an average of almost three books per day, and if this be the average for one country only (the U. S. A.) then Freemasonry prints and publishes not less but many times more than all other societies and fraternities. It has been estimated by professional bibliographers that during the past two centuries more books have been published on Freemasonry than on any other single subject!
A copy of the Annual Proceedings of a Grand Lodge is a remarkable book. The form, arrangements, and contents of it have been perfected by generations of experience. It contains a list of Grand Officers and Grand Lodge Committees; the Grand Master's Address; reports by Grand Officers; reports of Standing and of Special Committees; a report by the Committee on Foreign (or, as it is also called, Fraternal) Correspondence. This last is a Standing Committee of great importance, which as a rule has as either its Chairman or its Secretary a Brother familiar with Masonic contemporary history, and which makes a written report so long that often it occupies a third of the volume. It is a review of the Annual Proceedings of each of the Grand Lodges with which the Committee's own Grand Lodge is in fraternal correspondence, full of a friendly but free discussion and criticism, and packed with data, facts of unusual interest, statistics, etc. If these Fraternal Correspondence Reports made by the 49 Grand Lodges were collected into a single set of books covering the past half century they would give us for that period a detailed, day-by-day history of Ancient Craft Masonry in the United States written by itself. As for the Annual Proceedings themselves, containing Grand Masters' Addresses, orations on special occasions, and Grand Lodge Committee Reports as well as the Fraternal Correspondence reviews they, if incorporated in a single set of books, would contain a great wealth of writings, articles and essays, and speeches and orations on almost every possible Masonic subject.
Alongside these official and semi-official publications is a zone occupied by a species of book which are not official in any sense, or to any degree, which were written by individual Masons and published by the authors or by private publishing houses, but which have so much weight, and are so widely used, and highly regarded that they have so permanently established themselves in Masonic thought and knowledge that they are almost a part of the Fraternity. These may be described as standard works. Among these are the volumes by Albert G. Mackey, especially his Encyclopedia o f Freemasonry and his Jurisprudence of Freemasonry, the former the most widely used Masonic book in the world, the latter the non-official book most often used by Grand Lodges. The histories written by Mackey, Gould, Hughan, Crawley, Lyon, Singleton, Robertson, etc., are to Masonic history what Thucydides, Livy, Burnet, Gibbon, Macaulay, Redpath, Adams, etc., are to general history. Among these standard works are a few which hold a unique position, and may be described as Masonic classics; any one of them may be out-of-date, or may propound some interpretation which the Fraternity has passed over, but in them is a salt, a touch of the ancient literary magics, which keep them alive long after they otherwise would be dead; Calcot's Disquisitions, Hutchinson's Spirit of Masonry, Pike's Morals and Dogma, Preston's Illustrations, Greenleaf's Lectures, etc., etc. These standard books, classics and near-classics, are characterized by their soundness and their sanity; that which speaks in them does not grow old; other Masonic books may-as a few have - become absurd in time, or be eccentric, or become deviates, or wander too far from the subject, these books never do; they are always as healthy as the sea, and fresh as the day. If anything true can be said of Freemasonry itself it is that it tries to be completely truthful, and so must its books be, and such books about it as are malproportioned, wild, incredible, fantastic are condemned by this fact.
Outside of these three zones of official books, semi-official books, and standard books "stretches a land which bends onward into the illimitable" in which are tens of thousands of books written by Masons for Masons, published year after year over a period of two centuries, in some forty or fifty languages, by men of every persuasion and degree of competency and walk of life, each of whom has written on his own responsibility and often at his own expense, "as the spirit moved him," on every possible question, theme, subject, problem, and detail. A student who has grown gray in this multitudinous literature (perhaps 200,000 titles) knows his own way about and can go where he wills without a conductor; a Newly-Made Mason cannot so easily find his own path thro that wilderness of writing; his best plan is to begin with four or five of the standard books (such as those of Gould and Mackey), upon which millions of Masons have passed their favorable judgments, until he is well-grounded in fundamentals.
With exceptions too few to count the whole of that literature can be characterized in one short sentence; it has been a labor of love. Our Fraternity has no colleges, universities, faculties, professorships, or foundations for research or for publication; it has little or no critical periodical literature; Grand Lodges do not guide Masonic writers or assume responsibility for their books or recognize or reward them; writers receive no salary, and only a few receive enough pay to cover the necessary expenses of writing, and hence make a free gift of their time - and also of their gifts. Once a Masonic book is published it is not reviewed or advertized in newspapers or magazines, is not stocked in book-stores, and must make its own way; and if his Brethren appreciate his book there is almost no way for a writer to know it.
The subject about which Masonic authors write their books is more than usually difficult - more difficult than the larger number of subjects taught in the universities. Half of it lies in the Middle Ages, "that little known land." The field it covers is unimaginably large - far larger than can be believed by a man who cannot read foreign languages. In it are Rites, and Bodies, and subjects like wheels within wheels. It is intimately connected with a number of large subjects outside itself: general history, Medieval history, history of the Eighteenth Century, law, the history of politics, Anti-Masonry in church and state, the gilds, etc., etc. Symbolism, a major theme, is one of the trickiest and most treacherous of specialties - and has a way of making the inexpert look ridiculous. As for special and detailed subjects in Masonic history and biography they are as numberless as the leaves in Vallomribrosa. As for Masonic jurisprudence it is so stubbornly itself, and so unlike general jurisprudence, that even a Roscoe Pound must learn a new kind of law in order to write about it.
To write so many books under circumstances
so unfavorable and for results so unrewarding, for so many thousands
of men to give so many thousands of years out of their collective
lives to do it, and solely "for the love Masons have for
Masonry," is, any impartial judge will admit, such a tribute
as no other Fraternity has ever received. For these men have not
been led to write by a hope of rewards which has pulled them from
in front, or by any fear or need which has pushed them from behind;
it is Freemasonry itself which has drawn them into it. If here
and there such a writer is incompetent, if a book now and then
is worthless, if once in a while a literary lunatic is at large,
it is unimportant in a literature so many-sided and so extensive.
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