Today, we received a letter dated 22 January 2009 and sent by the Labadie Collection, the foremost collection of anarchist literature in the USA. This letter "acknowledge[s] receipt of Character Assassin: Bob Black's Vendetta Against Bill Brown. We will be sure to add it to the Ladabie Collection and to note its presence when we index Black's Papers." "Black's Papers" refers to the personal papers of the self-proclaimed "post-Leftist anarchist" Bob Black, which include his ludicrously inaccurate and hateful history of Brown's "misadventures" from the mid-1980s to 2004, entitled "Memories of Bill Brown." This Orwellian hatchet-job bears the legend: "Prepared as an introduction to a file on Bill Brown for inclusion in the author's papers archived in the Labadie Collection of the University of Michigan." And so we now rest assured that posterity -- allowed the benefit of getting "both sides of the story" -- will judge the matter appropriately.

Published in a very limited edition on 15 January 2009, Character Assassin: Bob Black's Vendetta Against Bill Brown is Brown's definitive account of the situation. It includes his only public statement, Expose of the Abuses Perpetrated by Black Black, Written by One of his Victims, which was published on-line on 27 November 2008, as well as two texts that have not and will never be published on-line: Brown's line-by-line annotation of the 62 mistakes, lies and calumnies in Black's "Memories," and Brown's preface to Character Assassin, which calls attention to Black's similarity to the type of yellow journalism practiced by police specialists. If anyone is interested in reading either of these two texts, they will have to go to Ann Arbor.