In recent years many old Masonic documents have become available to the general public. So many even and so scattered over the world wide web, that I have decided to create a catalogue of some of these archives and documents. I took out about 400 images, mostly tracing boards, and present them with a title and source, so you can look up the documents where they came from yourself.
On this website you will find images from the Kloss collection, Fonds Gaborria, Fonds Maçonnique (including La Géométrie/Physique/Alchemie du Maçon and the Baylot collection), the Mutus Liber Latomorum, Vuillaume’s Manuel Maçonnique, Le Parfait Maçon, Les francs-maçons écrasés, Ordre des francs-maçons trahi, Manuscrit Tarade and a few sources with fewer images (“other”).
The youngest source is from 1820, hence, all images are over 200 years.
All images, except those from the Cayers Maçonniques are within the public domain. The owners of the archives have put the documents where I took the images from on their websites. The images of Cayers Maçonniques are not (yet) available on the website of the National Library of Australia, but because I had the opportunity to publish all images of Cayers Maçonniques (Vol. I) and Maçonnerie des Hommes (Vol. II-VI) together for the first time and I am allowed to do that as long as I refer to the source of the images, these images are presented here and in the book.
This goes a bit against the original idea of the book and the website (a catalogue of little known images from the public domain), but since this is the first time you can actually see the images of all six volumes together, I decided to take this turn. I think that for the first time such a large number of these images are presented together. More about these sources under “sources”.
This website should be seen as a catalogue. Most images you can get at a better resolution when you look up their sources. The aim here is that you can find an image that you are (or was not yet) looking for and learn where it is from, not to make a fancy website with high resolution images.
Be amazed how early some images were already present, compare different drawings, see what symbols were used when or where, find images by the names of their degrees, but most of all: found out where the images come from and check out the sources themselves.