I blame it all on Fernand Braudel.

See, this last Thursday I was reading The Wheels of Commerce, and Braudel mentioned a French merchant with really intricate ledgers of his trading activities that Braudel didn’t have the patience to untangle, and it occurred to me that modern computer methods are excellent at that kind of thing, and then I wondered if there are any other publicly available ledgers that could be analyzed, and then I found that Ben Franklin’s ledgers are public domain, and then I learned that he got his start in politics in 1729 by writing a short pamphlet called “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency.”

And so I read it and it was really good and important and then I found out that while there are a few academic editions, no one has yet produced an annotated edition that would be helpful for students and other interested readers.

And I was getting a little burned out on big complicated projects, and this seemed like a fun little project for me to do in a relatively short time, and hopefully it would recharge the batteries for my bigger stuff.

So I’m doing it. And it’s almost done.

And then it occurred to me that fun little annotation projects like this could be an interesting sideline, alongside my other work. But I wanted to find out if enough people would be interested in that sort of thing to make it worth my time.

So I’m doing a Kickstarter.

Check it out!